ECE Returns: Completing the Annual Census

Key points from MOE before submitting the Return

Before submitting your ECE Return, ensure you have completed your ECE Return correctly. 

All children must be allocated a National Student Number (NSN) and all enrolment, attendance and staff details must be up to date. In particular, services need to ensure their staff qualification and certification information is up to date for each staff member.

Data Preparation

Before you click the "Submit Return" or the "Resubmit Return" please complete the below:  

1. Record child attendance for the return week and double check information is correct via Attendance.
2. Update staff information via Staff > Staff Details tab > ECE Yearly Census Details.
3. Ensure all children have been allocated an NSN by viewing the Invalid Child Data report found in Reports > Children Reports.
4. Updated staff contact hours via the Roster*.
   
   *If you are a Homebased Service - this includes your Educators for the week - we have added a link at the bottom of the return that will automatically populate the roster for the week for all Educators and Nannies, for those who do not already have a roster entry. 
   This information is based on the recorded Attendance for the week.
    
   

Submitting

To submit, navigate to the left-side menu > Ministry > ECE Returns

You will see listed under this menu, your service's past, current and future returns. You may find ones that you have not completed that are for unusual time periods, this is because sometimes the MOE allows centres to complete returns for alternative periods for a variety of reasons. If you are not one of these cases you can ignore those ones - select the one for the period you need to complete.

Clicking "Submit Return" starts the process, information isn't sent to the MOE at this stage - this is done once the form is completed.

Discover will save the information entered in the form as it is being completed, so the form does not need to be completed in one sitting.

Wait Times at Your Service

Waiting times provide an indication of how long children wanting to start attending an ECE service would have to wait before the service could take them in.

Click on the Edit button and fill out as appropriate - this must be complete before being able to submit.

Teaching Languages at Your Service

Teaching languages include all spoken languages and signed languages of communication used during the formal programme in your service.

Click on the Edit button and fill out as appropriate - this must be complete before being able to submit.

Staff Activity for the ECE Return Week

IMPORTANT: If you have already updated your staff details via their profiles, do not click "Refresh Data" in the blue banner labelled "Staff Activity for the ECE Week" (as below)

Click on the red 'Select Role(s)' button next to the name of each staff member. For non teaching roles, check the box for any role that the staff member worked in this week.

Once you have select this button and the staff information pop-up window has opened, the 'Refresh Data' button can be used from within this window, if needed.

Staff Roles at my Service

Clicking on the text of each line will provide more detail. Information included here is pulled directly from the Staff Profile, but can be edited if necessary.

Contact Hours 

For teaching staff, provide the actual contact start and finish times for all teachers who were teaching this week. 

A teacher can have multiple contact sessions on one day e.g. a session in the morning from 10am-12pm and a session in the afternoon from 1pm-3pm. 
Do not include non-contact time and breaks of 15 minutes or more in the contact hours. 
If a teacher was not present this week, do not enter contact hours. If you have used a relieving teacher during this week, add that teacher to your staff records and enter the relieving teacher’s contact hours.


Hours Worked

Provide the total number of hours the staff member worked at the service during the return week, including contact and non-contact time and breaks.

- for each staff member listed you need to click "Select role(s)" and complete as appropriate, when reviewed then the grid will show "Done".

Within the "Select Roles" you will find the information pulled in from their staff record. Clicking on the text of each line will show more detail which you can review if need be.

Age Band

For all staff except senior management and support staff, please record the applicable age band for each staff member by role.

Please Note: If there are many staff entries where the Ethnicity is set to "Not Stated", the MOE may ask you to re-evaluate and resubmit - so if you have the Ethnicity you should set it accordingly - you can update it here and this will then update the Staff record (this is the best way to do this in this situation if you discover this when completing the return). 

2023 Updates - please click here to see the additional questions added

When completing the annual census, Discover performs many checks to verify you have your data loaded correctly.

It is not unusual for services to miss times when the roster is set to have "Contact" when the children are not actually onsite - e.g. late turning up or have all left for the day. You will see a warning at the bottom of your screen.

"You have recorded staff contact hours during the ECE return week that falls outside of child attendance for the same week."

This is only a warning and you are still able to submit in this state but you should review these records to ensure you haven't made a mistake. The MOE advise that they need services to consciously review their contact hours captured in the ECE Return.

You can check your Roster for staff tasks that are "Contact" before Licensed Opening Time or set After Licensed Closing Time - additionally, check the Staff Ratios by hovering over the times and you will see the timeslot where the Child count is 0, you should set those tasks to a No Contact task.

Another way to easily spot these is to click on the "Toggle to Show Screen Ratio" 

This will show the number of Staff rostered on and the number of staff over the requirement - thus if they are the same figure then there are no children present but there are staff rostered on - change their task to "No Contact" or similar.

Clarification regarding the collection of Hours Worked (actual or total) - from MOE

All services, other than Playgroups, are asked to record the total hours worked for each employed staff member.

The following message will be displayed in Discover -

Hours Worked include contact time, non-contact time, breaks and unpaid work, but only on the services’ premises, and do not include any leave, unpaid breaks of 15 minutes or more, or any time the staff member was 'on-call'.

If a staff member performs more than one role, services need to add together all the time worked across these roles.

Capturing the total hours worked by each staff member during the ECE Census week enables MOE to understand the ECE workforce at a more granular level. It will also help to provide an insight into how much time staff spend outside of contact time with children.

Validation for contact hours vs total hours

Contact hours cannot be greater than the total hours worked. Discover will validate this rule when submitting your ECE Census. If the rule is broken and contact hours exceed total hours, you will be prompted to amend the relevant staff member’s hours.

Why am I being asked about staff who have left?

The census requires information of staff where they were present at the centre at the time of the last census, who have subsequently left, to also be included.

For further information from the MOE please click here