Te Whāriki is New Zealand’s national early childhood education curriculum, first introduced in 1996 and updated in 2017. It is a bicultural framework founded on Te Tiriti o Waitangi, built around four principles and five strands, and it shapes how kaiako plan, observe and document learning across the country. While it shares deep roots with Australia’s Early Years Learning Framework (EYLF), the two are structured quite differently, and understanding both matters for anyone working across the Tasman.
What Te Whāriki Actually Is
The name “Whāriki” means a woven mat, and that image is the whole philosophy in one word. Rather than prescribing a fixed sequence of content or milestones, Te Whāriki sets out a foundation that each centre, each community and each child weaves together in their own way. The principles and strands are the threads; the local context, culture and relationships are how those threads are woven into something unique.
This is a deliberately non-prescriptive design. Two centres can both deliver Te Whāriki authentically and look completely different in practice, because the framework trusts kaiako to interpret it in response to the tamariki and whānau in front of them.
At its heart sits a vision: children who are competent and confident learners and communicators, healthy in mind, body and spirit, and secure in their sense of belonging. Everything in the curriculum points back to that aspiration.
The Four Principles
The principles are the foundational beliefs that underpin all curriculum decisions. They are:
- Whakamana (Empowerment): the curriculum empowers the child to learn and grow.
- Kotahitanga (Holistic Development): the curriculum reflects the holistic way children learn and grow.
- Whānau Tangata (Family and Community): the wider world of family and community is an integral part of the curriculum.
- Ngā Hononga (Relationships): children learn through responsive and reciprocal relationships with people, places and things.
These principles are not optional add-ons. They are the lens through which every interaction, environment and learning experience is shaped.
The Five Strands
If the principles are the beliefs, the strands are the areas of learning and development the curriculum nurtures. Each strand carries its own goals and learning outcomes, and notably each is framed around mana, recognising the inherent prestige, strength and dignity of the child.
- Mana Atua (Wellbeing): the health and wellbeing of the child are protected and nurtured.
- Mana Whenua (Belonging): children and their families feel a sense of belonging.
- Mana Tangata (Contribution): opportunities for learning are equitable, and each child’s contribution is valued.
- Mana Reo (Communication): the languages and symbols of children’s own and other cultures are promoted and protected.
- Mana Aotūroa (Exploration): the child learns through active exploration of the environment.
Wellbeing and belonging sitting at the front of the strands is significant. Te Whāriki treats a secure, well child who feels they belong as the precondition for all other learning, not as one outcome among many.
The Bicultural Foundation
What most clearly distinguishes Te Whāriki from other curricula is that it is bicultural by design, founded on Te Tiriti o Waitangi. This is not a cultural overlay or a section to be covered. It runs through the structure itself. The principles and strands carry te reo Māori names because Māori concepts genuinely underpin them, not because the English terms have simply been translated.
In practice, this means kaiako are expected to honour te reo Māori, tikanga and mātauranga Māori as living parts of the programme, and to support every child to develop a strong, confident cultural identity. The curriculum positions Aotearoa New Zealand’s bicultural heritage as a shared foundation for all tamariki, regardless of their background.
How Assessment Works
Assessment under Te Whāriki is dominated by narrative assessment, most commonly known as learning stories. Rather than ticking off a checklist of skills, kaiako observe a child in genuine play and write a short narrative capturing what the child was doing, what it tells us about their learning, and where it might lead next.
Learning stories are credit-based: they focus on what a child can do and the dispositions they are developing (curiosity, perseverance, confidence) rather than cataloguing deficits. This approach fits the woven-mat philosophy, because it keeps assessment grounded in the individual child’s real experiences and relationships rather than a standardised yardstick, and it is why so many centres think carefully about how they document learning against Te Whāriki’s five strands.
How Te Whāriki Compares with the EYLF
For educators who move between New Zealand and Australia, the good news is that the two frameworks come from the same family. Both are child-centred, play-based and grounded in sociocultural theory: the idea that children learn through relationships, culture and active participation in their world. And both place belonging right at the centre of a child’s early experience.
The structural differences are where they diverge:
- Te Whāriki is organised around four principles and five aspirational strands, each framed through mana, and is explicitly bicultural, founded on Te Tiriti o Waitangi. Its strands describe broad aspirations for the child rather than defined outcomes to be achieved.
- The EYLF, titled Belonging, Being and Becoming, is built on three foundational concepts (belonging, being and becoming) alongside a set of Principles, Practices and five Learning Outcomes. Its five Learning Outcomes give it a more outcome-oriented spine than Te Whāriki’s strands.
Put simply: both describe similar ground, but Te Whāriki leans into aspiration, biculturalism and the woven-mat metaphor, while the EYLF organises the same child-centred philosophy around its Belonging/Being/Becoming concepts and five Learning Outcomes. Neither is a checklist (both trust educators to interpret the framework), but the EYLF’s learning outcomes can feel a little more concrete to those used to working with them.
Why This Matters for Educators
For kaiako and centre leaders, the practical takeaway is that the philosophy travels well even when the structure does not. An educator trained in the EYLF who moves to a New Zealand centre already understands play-based, relationship-driven, belonging-focused practice. What changes is the framing: learning to think in terms of mana and the woven mat, to centre Te Tiriti and te reo Māori authentically, and to document through learning stories rather than outcome-mapped records (records that increasingly need to carry through as tamariki transition from ECE to school).
The reverse is equally true. Recognising where the frameworks align, and where they genuinely differ, helps educators carry their best practice across systems without flattening what makes each curriculum distinct.
That documentation work is where many centres feel the pressure most, because narrative observation is rich but time-consuming to gather, organise and make sense of over time. Tools like Personhood360 are designed to help kaiako document learning aligned to frameworks like Te Whāriki and turn those narrative observations into measurable insight, so the story of each child’s growth stays visible rather than getting lost in the day-to-day.