We are a Pasifika education and care service that started as a Tokelauan language nest 5 years ago and has since become licensed and chartered – with lots of learning along the way!

Staff were concerned about children who were consistently being picked up late at the end of the day as this had a spin-off effect in terms of staffing ratios for licensing requirements. Staff brought this issue to the committee, who looked at their policy on the collection of children.

We discussed the policy and decided that it needed to be reviewed. The policy included a penalty clause: "If you are late and do not ring, you will incur a penalty late fee of $20.00". This surprised us as we had not been applying this penalty clause. The committee realised that it needed to bring this issue to the attention of everyone in the community (including the committee members, who had also been picking their children up late on occasion!). So, we planned to increase parent awareness of this policy by placing it on a noticeboard for 2 weeks with a comment sheet attached.

The noticeboard comment sheet remained empty for the 2-week period. We found, however, that it prompted a great deal of discussion about the penalty between teachers, parents, and the committee members. This was mainly about the advantages and disadvantages of the penalty and the impact it could have on families. Staff made notes about these discussions in their daily diary. Names were not recorded – only the content of the discussion was included.

The diary notes were read out at the next committee meeting. Overwhelmingly, the responses indicated that the community had not been aware of the policy or of the penalty. Most of the responses described a lack of awareness both of the need to ring if late and of the implications of lateness on staffing requirements. This was largely because families hadn't read the policy. We realised that as a number of our policies are written in Tokelauan, some of our families are unable to read them. Not all our families are Tokelauan. We have a wide range of ethnic groups, including African families, now attending the centre. This communication problem surprised us as we had not thought about the changing dynamics of our community and the implications of this since our beginnings in 2001.

Our diary recordings showed that families didn't object to paying the penalty, just that they didn't know about it. We realised that this wasn't fair. We asked ourselves, "If they don't know, why should they pay?" However, we had to consider who would pay for the extra staffing required and where we would find the additional staff to be on call. By asking these questions, we realised that we had a real issue to resolve.

The results showed clearly that families were unaware of centre policy and of the expectations held by centre staff. Management agreed that until the information was accessible to everyone, we could not impose the penalty payment. We decided to obtain signed confirmation from each family – so that we could be sure the information was understood for the future.

We realised that we need to review our policies and procedures on a regular basis. We recognised that they all have a purpose and are important for the day-to-day running of the centre. As a result, we decided to translate all our policies and procedures into English and to set up a regular reviewing cycle.

Here it is.

We found that when we used both languages, we got much better review feedback (including written feedback in both English and Tokelauan). As well, and most importantly, the policies and procedures came alive for everyone.

While looking through our policies and procedures, we also realised that, conversely, our philosophy statement was in English and hadn't been reviewed for 4 years. We started a new review that took us into an exploration of our philosophy and how it shines through in our vision for the many cultures in our service. We also looked at the languages we use while maintaining our Tokelauan character, and our vision for children. This indicated to us the importance of language that is meaningful to all families in our service. We realised too, through all of this, the importance of integrating our Tokelauan values with Ministry requirements.

Ko te Matiti Tokelau Akoga kamata he akoga Tokelau e whakavae i te aganuku ma te lotu, auala mai i na takutukuga a Matiti Tokelau Akoga kamata ma te Ministry of Education.

Our philosophy statement now reads like this: