Teachers
We want to help you to rediscover your ‘why’ and take control of your life and career, by becoming a home-based educator. Our educators benefit from low ratios and incredible flexibility. We are professionalising home-based, we partner with qualified teachers and educators and we focus on quality over quantity.
Our commitment to teachers
“Whāngaia ka tupu, ka puāwai.
That which is nurtured, grows and blossoms.”
We are committed to you as a professional, as an individual and as a member of our tribe. We will empower you to take control of your life and your career. We will support you to create an authentic learning environment in your home and a programme that reflects your personal philosophy. We will help you become your own boss, set your own income rate and create your own working conditions. Our Visiting Teachers and Tiny Nation HQ team will offer second-to-none, one-on-one support and answer any questions you have, as we support your transition to home-based and help you to run a successful business.
Do it your way!
Rediscover your passion. Live and breathe your ‘why’.
- Create a work-life balance that suits your family.
- Set your own hours and rate – calculate how much you could earn here.
- Work with low ratios of children.
- Create stronger connections with children and whānau.
- Follow your own teaching philosophy.
- Create your own learning environment at home.
- Enjoy flexibility and enjoy regular outings out and about in the community.
- Enjoy Tiny Nation support whilst being your own boss.
Welcome home - you belong here.
Why home-based? That’s easy. It’s familiar and it’s authentic.
A Tiny Nation home-based educator is a qualified and experienced teacher or educator. Our educators have chosen to set up and run their own early learning service from the comfort of their own home.
They have full control over their own service conditions, setting their own hours of work, rates per child and teaching philosophy.
Educators can have up to four children in their care at any one time, including up to two under the age of two.
Our educators all start with a passion for, and experience in, early childhood education and care. They love being a part of the early learning space and the positive impact that they can have on the lives of our youngest and most vulnerable. Our educators tell us that they appreciate being present for a child’s complete learning journey, throughout the day and years in their care.
Many educators also choose this pathway because of the flexibility and control that comes with being their own boss and operating as a contractor. They can set their own rates and benefit from tax breaks, increasing their earning potential. They can choose their own hours and make their work fit around their family life, and they also enjoy being able to delve into their own teaching and learning philosophy. Being an educator allows them to get out and about in their community, supporting their children to learn real life skills and connect authentically with their local environment. It’s definitely a lifestyle decision and one that paves the way for a successful career.
Working as a contractor means that you choose to work for yourself instead of someone else. This allows you to determine how you operate your home-based service and means that you have a direct contracting relationship with the families that choose you as their educator. This is perhaps the biggest change that you would be factoring in if you are deciding to move from a centre-based teacher role to a home-based educator role. To help you work through this, we’ve designed an FAQ fact sheet that shares more information around what it means to become a self-employed contractor, including the significant tax benefits. Generally speaking, our educators only pay tax on less than half of their total earnings!
As a contractor, you will be responsible for declaring your income to IRD and paying your income tax. We help to make this super simple though and provide all educators with the information and tools required to calculate taxable income and report this to IRD. This includes a summary of your earnings, the total hours worked during the year and an income tax calculator. We also hold an online tax workshop before you need to file your return.
One you are a registered educator with Tiny Nation, you are allocated a Visiting Teacher. Your Visiting Teacher will be your key go-to person for anything and everything you need. They are qualified and registered teachers, so they support you with curriculum design and delivery in your home, as well as resourcing and set-up. They will help you keep on top of health and safety requirements and let you know of any changes to policies and procedures to help you continue to meet Ministry requirements.
When it comes to your enrolments, they facilitate the family enrolment on your behalf behind the scenes, to make sure that families have a seamless enrolment experience and can benefit from ongoing support from the wider Tiny Nation team.
Your Visiting Teacher will visit your home at least once every month to observe each child in your care, as a part of our Ministry of Education licensing obligations.
They also create rich and diverse learning opportunities in your local community, with Tiny Nation events and outings forming a regular part of our programme delivery. This allows you to connect with other Tiny Nation educators and offers varied programme opportunities that allow you and your tiny learners to get out and about, learning through experiences.
Along with our HQ team, your Visiting Teacher will support you as you build relationships and foster connections with new families and children. You also have access to our team of marketing experts who will support you with setting up your own service, building a webpage and creating professional marketing material, advertising online and growing your own base of family enquiry.
Many of our established and experienced educators have strong word of mouth referrals and have cultivated their own waiting lists based on their credibility and reputation in their community. As a high quality provider, Tiny Nation experiences high demand from families for care and we work hard to make sure we have a strong presence in our local communities. Our office-based team manages enquiry on a daily basis from families who are looking for care. Technology platforms and ongoing communication with our educators allows us to regularly match family enquiry with educator places.
Tiny Nation educators have a direct line of communication with us at HQ and we have a dedicated and experienced marketing support person to help our educators find families in their area. By letting us know their availability, we can help educators fill their spaces efficiently. We can also provide additional marketing support when needed.
Tiny Nation has a payment administration service that you and your families can choose to use to administer all payments to you.
This means that we do the heavy lifting for educators by providing a service where families pay fees to a nominated Tiny Nation holding account and we then pass the fees and any subsidies onto educators all together in one fortnightly payment.
Yes! As a qualified teacher working in home-based, you can maintain your Tiwhikete Whakaakoranga Pūmau | Full Practising Certificate (Category Two).
Be valued for your contribution.
Set your own hours and rates. Be flexible and enjoy a great income.
Calculate how much you could earn.
Take control of your career.
There's never been a better time.
Be your authentic-self.
At home but never alone.
Programme Resources
Tiny Nation educators benefit from the support of a regular visiting teacher and monthly resource packs, to assist learning and planning.
Business Support
We help educators run a successful business, connect with families and fill child spaces efficiently through our unique Educator Marketing Hub.
Community Connections
Educators have the freedom to run their own business but are never alone. Our active learning community meets regularly and connects online.
Shining the spotlight on our educators
We value our educators as individuals, each with a unique experience, training and journey. We showcase their passion, talents and ‘why’ through our educator spotlight series and on their very own, personalised Tiny Nation webpage, to promote their home-based service in their community.
Angela’s story
Enjoying the perfect work-life balance, Angela applies her passion by leading the curriculum and transforming everyday moments into teaching opportunities.
Kylie’s story
Kylie is a registered teacher and former curriculum lead. She chose home-based education for greater independence and control of her working environment.
Janene’s story
As a home-based educator, Janene feels the freedom to follow her own teaching philosophy and empowered to create a learning environment to match.
Find out more. Tiny Nation educators benefit from:
Educators set their working hours and rate, giving them more control over their earning potential. Plus, educators are eligible for IRD tax breaks because they work from. With a tax-free allowance (per child, per hour), many educators find they are able to earn more as a home-based educator than as an employee because they can keep more of what they earn. Tiny Nation also contributes to educators’ remuneration through a fortnightly resource payment.
Hourly rates reflect experience and knowledge, and we can guide educators when it comes to setting their rates. We also offer business support and host annual online tax evenings, to help educators feel confident about filing their tax returns. Tiny Nation will also make resource payments, to support you to deliver a rich programme for children.
Ultimately, we want to ensure that your work as an educator is acknowledged with the appropriate remuneration. After all, you’re doing the most important job of all!
We walk alongside you to provide support, resources, tools and mentoring. We get that taking on responsibility for shaping little minds is a big deal! So that you never have to do it alone, we have created a Tiny Nation village to tap into. Our village of support is here to help you with:
- Initial registration, business set-up and marketing.
- Getting clear on your early learning philosophy and how it will inform your day-to-day programme.
- Planning programmes for the children in your care and using Te Whāriki (the Early Childhood Curriculum) in a way that is meaningful and authentic.
- Resources to support bi-cultural practice.
- Regular communication with your families (newsletters, social media, online journaling).
- Ongoing business support and mentoring (with experts in tax and contracting roles).
- Growing your professional networks as an educator – with each other, with other community support agencies and with prospect families.
- Exclusive partnerships, offering educators discounts on quality learning resources.
Tiny Nation has a unique business and marketing support service. We empower our educators to run a successful business, so they can focus on doing what they love – teaching!
We have a dedicated and experienced marketing person who identifies with educators’ needs because they have been an educator themselves.
We create personalised marketing material, including a maintained webpage for each of our educators to promote their service and advertise their availability. We offer complete transparency by notifying our educators instantly of family enquiry coming through their webpage and we help manage the process of connecting with families.
Tiny Nation educators have a direct line of communication with us at HQ, so they can let us know their availability and request additional support, to fill spaces efficiently.
At Tiny Nation, we value our educators as individuals.
Early learning teaching philosophies are very personal. We know that, while many services prescribe to a certain philosophy or theory, each teacher has a unique view on what attracted them to the industry and why they do what they do. At Tiny Nation, we don’t ‘prescribe’ an over-arching learning philosophy for educators. Rather, we share a toolkit of resources that allows you to craft your own philosophy in consultation with the families and children in your care.
We have invested in making the complicated simple by using innovative technology. We know you want to get on and do what you do best – educate and care for children! We don’t want you to be weighed down by unnecessary paperwork and administration so we have taken the pain out of it. We’ve developed innovative solutions and created simple online processes and templates. You can access all of this by using your Tiny Nation Tablet Computer (issued to you before care begins). This will sort everything from parent sign-in and communication through to real-time policies and procedures. You can even do your daily journaling and request business or marketing support on it… it’s your one-stop-shop.
We recognise the important role and responsibility that all Tiny Nation educators, families and staff play in keeping our children safe. We provide personal support to ensure you feel comfortable with meeting all health and safety requirements in your service. This includes providing free refresher child first aid courses every two years and annual child protection training – all delivered by experienced and accredited facilitators.
One of our key values is connection and we want to connect regularly with you! Tiny Nation represents a collective of people who are all dedicated to lifting the bar when it comes to early learning experiences for children. We encourage open communication at all times, as this plays an essential role in understanding where we can do more to foster our Tiny Nation movement. One aspect of this communication includes termly educator evenings where you will have the opportunity to discuss anything and everything with the wider Tiny Nation team, including the leadership team. We also take the temperature regularly with educator feedback surveys to ensure we keep delivering what matters. We don’t just talk about transparency and trust; we act on it.
When you are selected as a Tiny Nation educator, you become a part of a community of like-minded educators and teachers. As a part of this, we deliver regular community programmes (learning through play, nature school, music and movement) for you to attend with the children in your care that are reserved solely for the Tiny Nation community. We also offer regular workshops, webinars and learning modules on early learning topics that are current and relevant to your role as an educator. We regularly get your feedback to make sure that our programmes and planning meet your needs and support your goals as an educator. We also provide you with regular peer networking opportunities so that you can benefit from the support and friendship of one another and have some fun along the way. After all, we’re all building this Tiny Nation together!
We know that as a trained educator or qualified teacher, you have already been exposed to professional learning and development opportunities. Ongoing learning contributes to being successful at what we do, and we want to model this thirst for learning for our Tiny Nation children. To recognize that all educators are on different learning pathways, all Tiny Nation educators will benefit from a $250 annual professional learning and development payment that they can invest in education and training opportunities of their choice, including first aid and child protection training. They will also have an annual release day to attend selected education and training.
It’s only right that when you belong to a collective you get to benefit from being a part of it! Tiny Nation has a number of pretty exciting resource partners offering our nannies and educators discounts and benefits on behalf of our educator collective. We want you to feel rewarded for being a part of Tiny Nation!
Home-based educators take on a significant responsibility when they agree to care for other people’s children. While we hope we never have to use this type of insurance cover, we have it in place to protect all of our educators. Statutory liability insurance provides cover for costs associated with any prosecution that might arise from children being injured while in your care. Public liability insurance protects you against third party property damage or bodily injury that may occur from the operation of your childcare business. The Tiny Nation insurance cover for both statutory and public liability claims is free to all educators.
We only recruit trained educators and teachers because we know that qualifications are linked to higher quality outcomes for children. We also want to be able to tailor our support services to include business mentoring and networking for educators that extends past just getting started in the industry. Because you are already trained, you’re looking for your next step. We have a dedicated early learning team to drive your ongoing learning and growth. This starts with our adult education trained visiting teachers, some of whom are also accredited Incredible Years® and Circle of Security® facilitators and trainers. Your visiting teacher will work with you to create your own career pathway based on your aspirations, philosophy and goals for the future.
Because we pride ourselves on nurturing strong industry partnerships, Tiny Nation will also lead you through an exclusive framework for education and training designed by a range of industry experts. This is where our relationships with early learning sector experts kick in and we get to benefit from the teachings of key influencers in early childhood education and child mental health and wellbeing.
When it comes to more formal education and training opportunities, we focus our efforts on supporting higher level learning and training by offering a tailored career pathway to Tiny Nation educators. We place huge value on education and training and want to see our educators grow and develop their skills so that our Tiny Nation children and families can benefit.
We like to think that at Tiny Nation we grow our family each time we bring in a new educator. We want you to feel a strong sense of belonging, connection and inclusiveness as you journey with us. You are, after all, at the heart of all we do. We want you to be proud to be a part of Tiny Nation and will provide you with branded clothing that is practical, stylish and high quality for you to wear with pride!
As a Tiny Nation educator, you will have exclusive access to our online shop. We listen to our educators’ feedback to make sure the shop is stocked with lots of useful branded goodies, that are practical day to day and help promote educator services within the community.
Testimonials
