do the most challenging and rewarding work are the special needs teachers and teaching assistants. If we really want to see growth and positive change in our country, we have to start building it from the ground up, brick-by-brick. If we want more skilled workers, we have to upskill our own students rather than importing workers. The argument that we only bring in migrant workers with skills we need is false. If that were the case, then why would people here on skilled migrant visas be doing retail assistant and fast food checkout operator jobs? There are 131,000 unemployed people in New Zealand, any one of them could fill jobs in either the two categories I’ve just mentioned. The best way to upskill our population is to encourage them to go on to further education, something that could be done by introducing free tertiary education. Work is the greatest liberator from poverty. One of the things we desire most is a decrease in poverty and an increase in employment. Incentivised tertiary education and training programs would be a great way to achieve this. We have to stop focussing on short term surpluses and look at the long term social cost we will have if we don’t invest in our own people through education. Better funding means better learning. By doing this we will be freeing up teachers and schools to focus on teaching methods and activities that best fit their students and communities. We cannot avoid change, but good leadership is often identified by a measured approach to change and therefore I believe the opportunities brought by technology merit further exploration, but this should not and cannot result in the replacement of a tried and tested school system. We need education reform, but full-time online learning is not and will never be the answer.
Financial Reporting Education Services provides a Financial Reporting Service to over 660 New Zealand schools – we are the largest provider of accounting services to school’s in New Zealand – and would love the opportunity to help you. Take all the worry out of Financial Management (Including completing your Annual Financial Statements in the new reporting format with ease) and have everything done on time, every time and done right! We have an office and personnel near you: Whangarei, Auckland, Hamilton, Rotorua, New Plymouth, Whanganui and Wellington. If you would like a no obligation quote to compare the cost of our service to what you are currently receiving, or would like to enquire exactly what our service involves, please phone:
Pete on 06 757 5489 or email: pete@educationservices.co.nz www.educationservices.co.nz
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School Lines Importers, Emulators & Copycats Lester Flockton
lester.flockton@otago.ac.nz
National Standards, targets, data driven improvement, literacy & numeracy fixation with curricular distortion, repetitive chiming of the Raising Student Achievement singsong, inquirybased teaching, public-private charter schools, “open plan” flexible learning spaces, one principal and one board managing and governing multiple schools, communities of schools (learners), communities of online learners, targeted funding, teaching first, master’s degrees for all, etc. etc. Where have the ideas behind all of these and other policy packages come from? Did the seeds for the “initiatives” germinate in fertile homegrown minds of smart, insightful and proven New Zealander educators? No. Did they come from practising professionals (principals and teachers)? No. School communities? No. School Trustees Association? No. On-song, in-favour academics? No. Government’s servants (Ministry of Education, ERO, and others)? No. Politicians? Surprisingly, no! If my answers to the above are accepted as correct (as they have proven to be), then where did the seeds for all of this stuff come from, if they didn’t originate down here? The answer is simple – they came from up there, undeclared at our borders through political immunity, perceived political capital, and academics’ freeways. Without exception, each of the packages listed above has derived from systems elsewhere, particularly the USA and UK, albeit that in most cases they have emerged as adaptive mutations. Now, there is nothing wrong with importing and adapting good ideas that we can be confident of working well in practice here as well as there. But when so many of the seeds of policies, packages and programmes have failed to produce convincingly sustainable and widespread results in their places of origin, then alarm bells should be sounded. The wholesale implementation gates should be firmly shut until imported ideas have undergone rigorous field trials and independent health and safety checks to protect vulnerable schools, vulnerable principals, vulnerable teachers and vulnerable children from harm and risks associated with ill proven policies. Let’s take just one example: National Standards. In a scripted 2010 video, Prime Minister Key announced: “I am concerned to learn that up to 1 in 5 of our children leave our schools without the literacy and numeracy skills they need to succeed. That’s right. Up to 1 in 5 New Zealanders leaving school with inadequate reading, writing, and math skills. That’s why the National led Government is introducing National Standards in all years 1 to 8 schools.”
So National Standards were specifically introduced by politicians on the premise of rescuing one-in-five children who are allegedly failing in literacy and numeracy (and let’s not forget that this policy, to all intents and purposes, derived from systems in the UK and USA). It has seen millions of dollars and thousands upon thousands of hours spent (not invested) on developing, implementing, administering and overseeing a system required of every child, every year level, and every non-charter primary school. Moreover, those at every level of the system are required to be involved – bureaucrats, their contract advisers, principals and teachers, and school boards. And now, after 5 years of heavyduty intensification, the results give overwhelming evidence that the policy is failing abysmally to deliver what the politicians claimed, as depicted in the following flat graph that shows at least 1 in 5 children continue to perform below the “standard”, which is typically mirrored in every other system we have been forced to follow. (figure 1) Endemic in all of this is persistent denial at the highest levels of the true causes underlying low achievement – causes that cannot be simplistically addressed by a National Standards industry (Or is it ignorance, or political inconvenience?). That is the shameful part of this enormously wasteful saga. To claim over and over that the remedy (again, National Standards driven) is improved teacher quality amounts to overstated nonsense. We know that, in general, children in mid-to-high decile communities succeed, while those in low decile communities are highly overrepresented among those who struggle. And interestingly, research tells us that there is little, if any, significant difference in the quality of teaching across the deciles. Therein lies the truth of the matter. A viewing of YouTube: The First 1000 Days/Johan Morreua/ TEDxTauranga, explains the realities that we all – especially
Source: Ministry of Education (2016), Education Counts
N Z Principal | N o v e m b e r 2 0 16