School Lines Cutting the Mustard – or Swallowing the Custard? Wrong Systems? Wrong People? Lester Flockton
lester.flockton@gmail.com
Announcing the Tomorrow’s Schools reforms back in 1988, David Lange, Prime Minister and Minister of Education, famously quipped “Good people. Bad system.” when referring to the administration of education as it was prior to Tomorrow’s Schools. But the system back then wasn’t all bad, just as it isn’t today, yet we most certainly have some wrong systems within our present system, and we clearly have some of the wrong people working those systems. The tinkering and numerous changes under the bonnet of Tomorrow’s Schools since Lange’s reforms, have in many respects corrupted and undermined the precepts of a self-managing school system. These changes are the result of successive Ministers of Education intent on stamping their mark on things, sometimes with encouragement from their bosses and officials. And now parts of the system are under a review, but we might question whether the right parts have been properly targeted and made the subject of much needed reform. Arguably, those parts of the system centre on the Ministry of Education itself and the Education Review Office. We might also agree that the Tomorrow’s Schools reviewers’ recommendations with respect to these parts are something of a befuddlement. The fickle-de-dee ideas of getting rid of regional Ministry offices and replacing them with district hubs (a-la District Education Boards) and getting rid of ERO and replacing schoollevel oversight with euphemistically titled hub “advisers” simply don’t cut the mustard. Failure to critically examine and think through the implications and consequences of such ill-conceived ideas would be tantamount to swallowing the custard, lumps and all. If you believe in the fundamental tenets of the self-managing school, then you would be a victim of naivety to also believe that the reviewers’ proposals would preserve, strengthen and uphold these tenets. Brian Picot, chair of the committee whose report provided the basis for Tomorrow’s Schools, described the education bureaucracy as it was then as centralised, cumbersome and expensive. A key response of the reforms was therefore to whittle it down to a staff of around 850, with two purposes: devolution of control to the local school and its community, and redistribution of the cost savings back to schools within an equity-based formula. The Ministry’s main functions were to be largely focused on policy advice, fiscal and property management. Thirty years on and the Ministry’s current staffing today sits at around a whopping 2900, which doesn’t include consultants, contractors and others handsomely rewarded for helping to do its work. It is again centralised, cumbersome and expensive and has taken control and initiative away from schools in some key areas that should more properly be their responsibility. The Ministry of Education is an essential part of the system,
including its district offices, but parts of the system of the Ministry are unhelpful, ill-qualified to understand the complexities of schools, inefficient, and too often obstructive to the self-managing school. There are too many in there who wrongly consider themselves as “knowing what is best” for schools, “being in charge” of schools, and clinging to a preoccupation with the generation of a lot of spurious data and incomplete interpretations of “evidence”. A brave Tomorrow’s Schools review would have dealt to the very considerable issues that envelope this part of the system, the way it is constituted, staffed, and the scope of its role. It is currently spending and controlling over $136 million a year on curriculum support and professional development. Let’s begin by passing all of that over to individual schools – and not via Ministry “providers” and dictates. Trust the schools! Most schools would accept a fair, balanced and sensible form of external review and accountability as the quid quo pro for the discretionary scope offered by self-management. But from the outset the Education Review Office has failed far too many schools in terms of being fair, balanced and sensible. Fortunately, it has moved away from its negative barking, chastising, “naming and shaming” and lighting fires to warm the media But in recent years it has become increasingly aligned with the Ministry’s narrow agendas rather than exercising a richer appreciation of what schools could and should be striving towards. During a school’s recent review, for example, a couple of the reviewers told the principal and Board that they had observed many excellent practices and programmes, but these were outside of the prescriptive scope of the review and therefore didn’t qualify to be included in the report. Their scope was substantially defined by literacy and numeracy data and their central office dictates. Every school would do well to have critical friends who help them validate and strengthen their own performance reviews, and that is precisely what the role of external reviewers should be – critical friends rather than critical fiends. The State is entitled to set reasonable expectations of schools in ways that recognise all schools are not of a piece, and it does so via the NEGS and NAGS National Administration Guidelines (which are to be dispensed with in 2023 thanks to one Ms Parata). These guidelines are consistent with self-management in that they give schools permission to make localised interpretations. NAG 1, for example, says the school should provide all students with opportunities to achieve success in all areas of The New Zealand Curriculum. That is, to provide balanced, well rounded learning opportunities. But the ERO has been side-stepping evaluations of this requirement by fixating on the Ministry’s narrow, myopic priorities. It is failing to administer fair, balanced and sensible reviews. It, like the Ministry, is also failing to understand that narrowly focused dogma simply doesn’t work.
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Inflexible centralised dictates on what and how ERO reviews should be administered is, however, only part of the problem. The other part that we hear over and over is the manner, attitude, inflexibility, and dubious qualifications of far too many reviewers and the inconsistency of their judgements from school to school and place to place. This has gone on for too long but trying to fix the problem by getting rid of external reviews of schools by a Government agency seems to be a seriously misdirected idea. It is the way the agency operates and the way it is staffed that are the real issues. Arguably, an external review agency should have one overarching function: to support and validate the school’s own reviews relative to the NAGs and to prepare with the school a joint report every three years. Moreover, the qualification of reviewers should be reconfigured. Ideally, a track record of successful school leadership in a range of settings, preferably to the level of principal of a mid-to-large school, along with verifiable personality characteristics of being a personable, fair minded, flexible thinking, sensible and a suitably qualified professional. Importantly, the review agency could be completely restructured and re-styled to become a very appealing career pathway for many school principals. Well, the above is yet another perspective on how things are and how things could be. Openly deliberating and reaching decisions on a range of perspectives and models is the essence of robust review, but that is not how it has been done with the Tomorrow’s Schools Review (wrong system?). As of writing we hear that its committee (some wrong people?) has changed some of its ideas. Let’s hope that they cut the mustard and remove the indigestible lumps from the custard.
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