On this page
Keep your child home if they are sick
Your tamariki | child must stay home if they are unwell. This will help your child recover faster and reduce the spread of illness to other children.
Make sure you let your service know if your child is sick and unable to attend. For some illnesses, there are rules around how long children must stay home – such as for 48 hours after vomiting or diarrhoea. Your early learning service will be able to tell you how long your child must stay home.
If many children become sick with the same illness at the same time, services sometimes need to close to manage these outbreaks.
If your child has a notifiable disease, your service will need to report it.
List of notifiable diseases – Te Whatu Ora | Health New Zealand
Head lice
Head lice are very common in young children and are easily spread. They are very treatable, but make sure you let your early learning service know if your child has head lice. This is so they can let other families know and take steps to reduce the spread, such as removing dress-up clothing until the outbreak clears.
Head lice (nits) – Te Whatu Ora | Health New Zealand
If your child gets sick or injured at their early learning service or Kōhanga Reo
If your child becomes unwell, centre staff or your child's home educator will call you and ask you to come and take your child home.
Injuries
All services will have at least 1 staff member with a valid first aid certificate for every 25 children present. Educators at home-based services must have a valid first aid qualification from an accredited first aid training provider.
Staff will call an ambulance if an injury is serious.
For minor injuries, staff will contact you or let you know at the end of the day. If a serious injury happens, staff will contact you straight away. All services will have documentation that must be completed, and you will be asked to sign the information.
Medicines
If your child needs to take medicine at their early learning services, you will need to provide written authority for the administration of that medicine to your child. This applies to prescription and non-prescription medications.
Early learning services have to keep a record of all medicine given to children attending the service. Records include:
- name of the child
- name and amount of medicine given
- date and time medicine was given and who administered it
- evidence of parental acknowledgement.
These are the criteria about administering medicine to children at early learning services.
Categories of medicine for criterion HS28
Immunisations
Your child does not need to be immunised to attend an early learning service. If they are immunised, the service will ask you to provide your child's immunisation record.
They need this information in case there is an outbreak of a vaccine-preventable disease at the early learning service. Children who are not immunised may be asked to stay at home if there is an outbreak.
