lester.flockton@gmail.com
Earlier this year, Chris Hipkins announced that the Government was to review the way our schools are led, managed, and interact with their communities. Unlike his predecessor, Hekia Parata, who misleadingly and untruthfully claimed that Tomorrow’s Schools hadn’t changed in 30 years, he correctly stated,
Schools would no longer have to requisition things like toilet paper and art and craft materials from their district Education Board according to a points quota system. Schools would no longer have their principal and teachers chosen and appointed by an Education Board. Principals and teachers would no longer have to apply to the local authority to attend in-service courses and have their travel expenses approved then paid out by the ‘There’s been a lot of tinkering around the edges since Education Board. And so, the examples could go on and on. Tomorrow’s Schools was introduced, which has moved the Self-management was about devolution of responsibility and governance, management and administration of schools decision making – away from the controls and dictums of an further and further away from what it aimed to achieve.’ obese bureaucracy. Moreover, it required new ways of setting Indeed, successive Governments since 1990 have played the down what schools were required to do. Volumes of regulations tinkering game, and none moreso were systematically repealed and than the previous Government whose Self-management replaced by a single and more flexible tinkering seeped well beyond the framework called National Education was about devolution of edges. But the significant difference Guidelines (NEGs) that gave schools this time round is that the process responsibility and plenty of scope for local interpretation promises to be more democratic, more and innovative practice. The regulated open and honest, and more respectful decision making – away requirements for assessment and than the arrogance of autocratic for example, were: Assess from the controls and dictums reporting, decree, spurious justifications, and student achievement, maintain ideological drama that characterised of an obese bureaucracy. individual records and report on the approach seen in more recent student progress (NAG 1 v). Nothing Moreover, it required new changes. more, and nothing less. That Before we rush head long into was it. Schools were entrusted to ways of setting down what spinning up magical solutions to exercise professionalism, discerning complex issues, everyone would be schools were required to do. knowledge and good judgment. well advised to brush up on exactly The dreamers, spinners, weavers, what Tomorrow’s Schools aimed to achieved. If these intentions curriculum distorters and system mechanics responsible for are validated or endorsed, then it becomes a matter of deciding creating a burgeoning obssessive compulsive data-manufacture whether they have been upheld (or undermined) in the way the industry predicated on mythologies of improvement weren’t on system has been managed, manipulated and regulated. If, on the scene back then. the other hand, the intentions themselves are now considered Establishing partnerships between schools and their flawed, then the building blocks themselves would need to be communities for the exercising of self-management was another reconstructed. But I very much doubt that this would be the case. key plank of Tomorrow’s Schools. This partnership was formalised So what were the key intentions or aims of the Tomorrow’s through the establishment of statutory bodies called Boards Schools reforms that were championed by David Lange, Prime of Trustees, which comprised locally elected members, the Minister and Minister of Education back in the late 1980s, principal, and a staff representative. Initially, secondary schools and do we still want to commit to them, keeping in mind that could also elect a student representative. Each member of the these reforms were about the structure of the administration Board was given equal status, yet with time this legal partnership of education at every level – and not many of the things that between school professionals and community members in too followed on, like Lockwood Smith’s ‘achievement initiative’ or many schools has been seriously undermined, largely due to national standards. the NZ School Trustees Association’s ‘us and them’, upper hand Tomorrow’s Schools was directed towards four major aims: attitude. This tension, for many schools, has been exacerbated by self-management, partnership, accountability and equity. the questionable suitability of some community people to serve Self-Management was at the heart of the reorganisation. on Boards, whether because of manner and attitude, or because
of the limited skills they have to sensibly and effectively govern. In many schools, the principal has been left to carry the burden and lead the initiatives. A third major theme of Tomorrow’s Schools, understandably, was accountability. School boards were expected to be able to demonstrate that they were performing within the State’s expectations, which were set down in the NEGs. The charter undertaking formalised this obligation, and the Education Review Office (ERO) was established as the State’s agent for ensuring compliance and suitable interpretation of the NEGs. With time, things became more and more prescriptive (Mallard enacted Charter changes that required targets, performance measures, analysis and reporting of variance, etc.). Furthermore, the ERO showed alarming inconsistency in how they judged schools and became quite selective in the criteria they used for their reviews, which ignored the scope of the NEGs. For example, the NEGs require schools to implement teaching and learning programmes “that provide all students in years 1 to 10 with opportunities to achieve for success in all areas of the National Curriculum” (NAG 1 (i)). ERO effectively ignored this requirement, instead fixating on literacy and numeracy performance as represented in screeds of data. In effect, ERO contributed significantly to the side-lining of the New Zealand Curriculum during years that were crucial for its development and implementation. Equity was the other major aim of the Tomorrow’s Schools restructuring. New Zealand has a wide stretch from poor socio-economic communities through to highly privileged, wealthy communities. Lange’s intention was to apportion ‘equity’ funding to help redress inequality of opportunity. Deciles were
the administrative mechanism, and savings from reducing the education bureaucracy from a couple of thousand to a few hundred was the source of funding. Made great sense. After all, a huge bureaucracy controlling a self-managing environment is a contradiction in terms. But with time, this has all become unstuck. New Zealand’s education bureaucracy is now bigger than pre-Tomorrow’s Schools and exercising more and more control, and ERO has sorely undermined the purpose of deciles (an administrative mechanism for equity funding), by using them as a basis for comparing student achievement, with the constant rattle that low decile schools were not up to standard! A terrible indictment on their impoverished understanding of indelible factors and influences related to student learning. But it has always been convenient to blame teachers and schools for society’s problems and the failure of misguided policies. It is now sometimes heard from those who should know better, that Tomorrow’s Schools has failed to reduce achievement disparities. They need to be reminded, (a) that this was never a claim or aim of Tomorrow’s Schools, and (b) that no matter what system devices are employed, schools on their own can never do this for most children of concern. It is irresponsible and misleading to suggest otherwise. The evidence abounds! So, then, is it the aims or intentions of Tomorrow’s Schools that should now be called into question, or is it the means to those ends that is of issue? Footnote: Dr Flockton served as a member of the Tomorrows Schools national implementation liaison team during 1988 – 1989
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