A Programme Is Not a System

Three questions the ENRICH announcement doesn't answer

Today the Minister of Education announced a major expansion of the ENRICH oral language programme, growing it from 65 early childhood services to 525 over the coming years, backed by $12.4 million from Budget 25 and targeting children from 18 months through to school entry. The announcement was framed around a concerning claim: that five year olds are arriving at school with the language skills of two year olds, with high levels of screen time at home named as a contributing factor.

Let me be clear from the outset. Any investment in the early years is welcome. The first five years of life do more to shape a learner’s trajectory than any other period, and they have been chronically under-resourced for decades. So when money flows toward children under five, and toward oral language in particular, that matters. It is also worth acknowledging that ENRICH is not an imported package. It grew from research at the University of Otago through the Kia Tīmata Pai study, developed and trialled here with New Zealand children.

But an announcement is not an outcome, and a programme is not a system. The questions that follow are not about ENRICH itself. They are about the conditions it is being planted into, because those conditions will determine whether this investment grows anything at all.

The condition no programme can compensate for

ENRICH works through interaction. Its unit of delivery is not a resource or a lesson but a sustained, responsive exchange between an adult and a child. That means its effectiveness is bounded by one simple question: how much genuine interactional time does each teacher actually have with each child?

Here the maths gets uncomfortable. Our ECE sector regulated minimum ratios sit at one adult to five children under two, and one to ten for children over two, in all-day services, stretching to one to fifteen in sessional settings. Many services operate at or near those minimums, not through any failure of will but because the funding model makes anything better difficult to sustain. Early years researchers and sector advocates have long argued that responsive caregiving for infants and toddlers requires something closer to one adult for every three children under two. ENRICH enters at 18 months, squarely into the age band where the gap between what the science asks of adults and what the ratios permit is at its widest.

Picture the serve and return exchange the research describes. A toddler offers a word, a gesture, a discovery, and the adult receives it, extends it, waits, and returns it. Now picture doing that with authenticity while four other 18 month olds also need you, right now, for feeding, comfort, nappies, safety and their own conversational offerings. Early years teachers I work with do not lack the desire for rich interaction. They lack the structural time and thinking space to be intentional about these interactions. Many of the concerns we later observe in five year olds, the very concerns this announcement responds to, trace back not to what teachers do not know but to how thinly their attention must be spread.

So here is the first question. As ENRICH scales, will its evaluation attend to the conditions under which it succeeds or struggles? A programme built on interaction quality cannot outrun an underfunded interactional environment. It would be a genuine loss if strong evidence about what children need became an argument that we have done enough, rather than an argument for resourcing the time that makes the practice possible. Announcing a programme is considerably cheaper than fixing ratios. It should not be mistaken for the same thing.

What about the resources we already have?

The Ministry has invested substantially in oral language over recent years. Te Kōrerorero | Talking Together sits freely available to every service. Kōwhiti Whakapae, the practice and progress tools spanning oral language and literacy, maths, and social and emotional learning, was developed specifically to help teachers notice, recognise and respond within our curriculum framework, with hard copies recently delivered to services across the country. He Māpuna te Tamaiti supports the social and emotional dimensions that the ENRICH trial itself found improved.

It would be easy to frame ENRICH as duplication. The more accurate picture is one of continuity, since some of the same researchers and implementers behind ENRICH contributed to the Ministry’s earlier oral language resources.

However continuity among the people involved does not automatically produce coherence for the teaching team in the room. So here is the second question. How will ENRICH be positioned alongside Kōwhiti Whakapae and Te Kōrerorero so that teachers experience one connected story about language and learning, rather than an accumulation of initiatives, each with its own resources, professional learning and expectations? Initiative fatigue is real in our sector, and it is the enemy of exactly the deep practice change this investment hopes to achieve. The hundreds of services joining this rollout deserve to know how the pieces fit together, and whose job it is to make them fit. If the answer is that nobody has thought about it yet, that tells us something about how this sector is planned for.

ENRICH inside Te Whāriki, not instead of it

Te Whāriki remains one of the most internationally respected early childhood curriculum frameworks in the world precisely because it refuses to reduce children to a schedule of skills. It is holistic, grounded in relationships, and built on the aspiration that children grow as competent and confident learners, secure in their identity, language and culture. Nothing in ENRICH’s underlying philosophy is at odds with that. Responsive conversation through play is Te Whāriki in action.

The risk is not the programme’s philosophy. The risk is implementation drift, the slow slide by which a programme’s fidelity requirements, assessment moments and resource sets begin to function as the curriculum, with Te Whāriki relegated to the poster on the wall behind them. We have watched versions of this movie in other jurisdictions, and increasingly in our own primary schools. The safeguard is not complicated, but it must be deliberate. ENRICH needs to be framed, resourced and evaluated explicitly as a way of enriching teacher practice within Te Whāriki, with the full breadth of its strands intact.

I would also note the framing that accompanied this announcement. Locating the problem primarily in screen time at home risks a deficit story about families, and describing five year olds as arriving with the language of two year olds risks a deficit story about children. Both framings sit awkwardly beside a curriculum whose starting point is the competence of the child and the aspirations of those who love them. The evidence for concern about language development may well be sound. The story wrapped around it matters, because teachers partner far more effectively with families who have been invited into a shared project than with families who have been implicitly blamed. Our youngest learners deserve better than to be introduced to the nation as a problem to be fixed.

The question that follows the logic

Here is what strikes me most about this announcement.

In backing ENRICH, the Government has endorsed a proposition that early years advocates have argued for decades: that children learn best through responsive relationships, rich conversation and play, met at their developmental level rather than marched to an external timetable. That is the beating heart of this programme, and the trial evidence cited in support of it, stronger oral language, better self regulation, improved early literacy and social skills, is evidence for exactly that proposition.

So here is the third question, and it is the one I most want answered. Why does this logic stop at the school gate? The refreshed New Zealand Curriculum moves in the opposite direction for the very same children just months later, toward year by year prescription and earlier formalisation. I anticipate the response, that both reflect a commitment to the science of learning, and I take it seriously. But it does not hold. The science ENRICH rests on is the science of responsive interaction, oral language and play as the engine of early learning and self regulation. That evidence does not expire on a child’s fifth birthday. If rich conversation and developmentally attuned teaching produce these gains at three and four, the burden of proof sits with those who believe five and six year olds suddenly need something structurally different. A child does not become a different kind of learner over the summer holidays between kindergarten and school.

The refreshed English curriculum makes this tension concrete. To be fair, oral language is not absent from the document. It appears as a named focus in the early years and as a component of the structured literacy approaches the curriculum mandates. But presence is not parity. Oral language sits in the curriculum largely as a servant of print, valued as the on-ramp to decoding and writing rather than as a literacy in its own right. The advisory thinking that shaped the redesign went further still, recommending that texts be defined exclusively as written material so that oral and visual modes would not draw time away from reading and writing. And the machinery of monitoring tells the real story. We check phonics. We assess writing. We report on reading. Nobody is measuring whether our eight year olds can hold a reasoned discussion, tell a story or argue a point aloud.

Which raises an awkward question about today’s announcement. If oral language matters enough to fund a national programme for our two, three and four year olds, why does it fade into an instrument the moment children start school? The implicit theory seems to be that ENRICH will finish the oral language job before age five, delivering children ready for the ‘real work’ of written literacy. That is not how language development works. Oral language is not a stage to be completed and signed off at school entry. It grows, or stalls, across the whole of childhood, and it remains the foundation on which comprehension, writing and thinking are built right through the school years. A programme at four cannot inoculate a child against an oral language desert at eight. If the Minister believes this investment is the panacea for oral language, the curriculum her own government has introduced quietly disagrees with her.

The transition to school is exactly where the gains this $12.4 million hopes to secure will either compound or evaporate. A government genuinely following its own evidence would be asking how the pedagogy it has just funded for four year olds carries through into the first years of school. That is the announcement I am still waiting to read.

Where this leaves us

Investment in the early years is always welcome, and the researchers and teachers who built this evidence base deserve every recognition coming their way. But the same recognisable pattern presents itself here. A programme is announced. The structural conditions beneath it go unaddressed. The announcement becomes the story, and the system rolls on unchanged.

So three questions, offered in good faith. Will we resource the adult time that interaction-based practice actually requires, specifically in relation to teacher:child ratios? Will teachers experience coherence rather than accumulation across the initiatives already in their hands? And will the developmental logic this programme embodies be allowed to follow our children through the school gate?

Programmes come and go. Conditions, coherence and curriculum are what endure. The measure of this investment will be whether it strengthens all three, and on that, the announcement is silent.

A footnote from the evening news

One last observation, offered with a smile. Watching the coverage on 1News tonight, there was the Minister, holding one of the ENRICH books up for the cameras. Clearly bilingual. Te reo Māori sitting proudly above the English. These are the resources the trial results were built on, the very evidence being celebrated in this announcement.

Readers with long memories will recall that this is the same Minister who, by her own account, once weighed up rewriting 27 decodable readers to strip out the Māori words beyond proper nouns. It seems the evidence has a sense of humour. The programme now fronting the Government’s early literacy story grew its results in books where both languages sit side by side on the page. Worth remembering, perhaps, the next time the presence of Māori words in children’s books is framed as an obstacle to literacy rather than part of it.