MIND THE (EDUCATION) GAP
Thirty years after the last radical shakeup in education, another one is being proposed. Do we really need it, asks Rob Mitchell.
They travel by car and bike. Richard Edmundson sees them every morning. As he greets pupils turning up for the day, the principal of Linwood College in Christchurch steals a glance at the traffic heading along Aldwins Rd.
Among those making their way into the city for work are hundreds of prospective pupils bypassing his school for education’s perceived promised land in the wealthier suburbs and single-sex schools to the west.
His school roll hovers around 700; it was twice that a few decades ago.
The Christchurch earthquakes didn’t help, but the damage had already been done in a much earlier shakeup for his school and more than 2500 others around the country: Tomorrow’s Schools.
It was a flagship policy for the 1987 Labour government, promoted vigorously by then leader and education minister David Lange. It was designed to raise the quality of education, lower the cost of its delivery and place greater power in the hands of those parents pushing their progeny along Aldwins Rd and avenues elsewhere.
But Tomorrow’s Schools is now regarded as yesterday’s folly, a neoliberal experiment that allowed too many schools to profit from a greater entrepreneurial profile and patronage, while trapping others in a downward cycle of middle-class flight and managed decline.
Which was kind of the point, says Simon Smelt, Treasury’s representative on the reform group that implemented the 1988 Picot Report recommendations that would become Tomorrow’s Schools.
It was the 80s: Rogernomics in full flight, Gordon Gekko convincing us that ‘‘greed is good’’, and ‘‘the neo-liberal heyday’’, he says.
‘‘As the consultation went on, there was such a strong feeling that the system was not working that the members got pushed to quite a radical position.
‘‘The State Services Commission and Treasury officials were fairly hardline on choice, reform and market-led. Other members kind of went with the flow.’’
That tide of change washed away decades-old education infrastructure, including regional education departments and inspectors, replacing them with parent-focused boards of trustees, the Education Review Office (ERO) and a sparkling new ministry.
Behind that wave was a relaxation of zoning and greater promotion of competition and choice, two key ‘‘pillars’’ of this education experiment.
‘‘If a school is doing particularly well, why would you stop it expanding,’’ says Smelt of the thinking back then, ‘‘and if a school is doing badly, why would you keep it going? The good school could take over the bad school and that sort of thing.’’
Unfortunately, it hasn’t quite happened that way, says Bali Haque, chairman of the independent taskforce appointed by the 2017 Labour coalition government to review the controversial 30-year-old legislation.
He believes those ‘‘good’’ schools have merely helped themselves to the perceived ‘‘good’’ students and the extra funding they represent in wealthy catchments, leaving the poorer, low-decile schools to contend with falling rolls, a greater percentage of harder-to-teach pupils, and fewer resources to deal with both.
Competition has created winners and losers. The gap between them is wide, and the former have become less willing to help the latter reach across.
‘‘We’ve been doing this for 30 years and we’ve all got conditioned to the way it is, that individual school boards and schools will pursue their own interests,’’ he says. ‘‘But I think what we’ve lost in that is . . . we are talking about an education system, not a whole lot of individual schools, and we have a responsibility to ensure the system provides for all our children.’’
Research shows that system has done a pretty good job for most. A background paper prepared for Haque’s taskforce said NCEA attainment had actually improved since 2000.
In 2016, ‘‘89 per cent of school leavers left with an NCEA qualification of at least Level 1, 80 per cent had achieved Level 2 or above, and 54 per cent left with Level 3’’.
Encouragingly, the biggest jump had been for Ma¯ ori and Pasifika students. And recent evidence from the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study showed ‘‘New Zealand students still performing above the OECD mean average’’.
A comparable study in mathematics and science reached a similar conclusion. But the report paints a worrying picture of the gulf that remains between our high and low achievers.
New Zealand has ‘‘a wider gap between the top 10 per cent and bottom 10 per cent of our students than in most other OECD countries’’, it says.
‘‘At the primary level there can be as many as two curriculum levels, or four years of learning, between students of the same year level . . . students in low-decile schools leave primary school on average two years below students from high-decile schools.’’
It’s a similar story in well-being and engagement. Students in lowdecile schools, invariably from lower socio-economic, Ma¯ ori and Pasifika communities, are more likely to be truants, leave early, be involved in disciplinary action, or simply not enjoy school. Children needing help with learning disabilities or special needs had similar experiences.
That’s a lamentable fail, according to Haque and his reforming colleagues.
‘‘The statistics in terms of achievement would indicate that we have created inequities in the system,’’ he says. ‘‘It has not delivered for too many children, and we will all pay the consequences of that.’’
The taskforce report – Our Schooling Futures: Stronger Together – recommends sweeping changes in eight key areas: governance; schooling provision; competition and choice; disability and learning support; teaching; school leadership; resourcing; and central education agencies.
It is essentially an attempt at redistribution of income and resources in education; it prioritises the collective over the individual; collaboration over competition; and equity over excellence.
And that’s what has many
people, including principals at some of our top schools, worried.
They are most concerned about the perceived undermining of boards of trustees, parent-focused powerhouses that have allowed some schools to tap into greater wealth and expertise in their communities, and any tampering with the zoning that has helped build those catchments. Also, a possible cap on donations.
Other radical proposals include the scrapping of intermediate schools as part of an overhaul of middle schooling, and major shakeups for ERO and the New Zealand Qualifications Authority.
The taskforce recommends 20 new education hubs replace the 10 current ministry regional offices.
Each of these new hubs would look after an average of 125 schools. They would be responsible for administration and property management, among other things. And look hard at the equity of school zones.
Crucially, they would take a leading role in appointing the most important person at each school, the principal. And that person would be employed by the hub, not the trustees.
Haque sees such intervention as vital support for schools struggling with a lack of capability and capacity within their trustees.
‘‘What parents on boards of trustees want is to be involved in deciding the goals of the school, the ethos and character of the school,’’ he says. ‘‘Parental input is not [about] how you teach maths.
‘‘We are really keen for the hubs to provide professional support for the schools, to provide support for teachers, principals, boards, so that we can get professionals back into the core learning stuff.’’
But one person’s support is another’s suffocation. Critics, including academics and sector leaders, see the rebuilding of meddlesome bureaucracy and power being stolen from parents and communities.
Steven Hargreaves, principal at Auckland’s Macleans College, is furious. He says the proposals would ‘‘destroy the school system
. . . as we know it’’.
He and other principals, including Tim O’Connor at Auckland Grammar, are urging people to stand up against the proposed reforms. Public consultation closes on April 7.
Haque sees the backlash as a symptom of the inequality the taskforce is trying to defeat.
‘‘It seems to me disappointing, the reaction from the principals of those schools, that are clearly advantaged schools,’’ he says, ‘‘and I think they are failing to take a view of our education system and all the children in the system, and think what is the best for our community.’’
Whetu Cormick, president of the New Zealand Principals’ Federation, takes a more measured view than his Auckland colleagues.
He understands what the taskforce is trying to achieve.
‘‘Treasury predicts that by 2050 the majority of the population will be Ma¯ ori, Pacific Islanders and Asian, and the minority will be European Pa¯ keha¯ ,’’ he says. ‘‘So we have some issues around what’s happening for those groups in terms of their achievement and how that impacts on our economy.’’
He likes the focus on greater support for both parents and educators; he applauds the desire to bring more collaboration into a system undermined by sometimes brutal competition, even pupil and staff poaching.
But he wonders if it makes sense to disrupt and rebuild an entire sector to fix a few struggling schools.
‘‘We have an education system where, on the whole, most of our schools are doing a really good job at a given time, really well financially and also offering a good curriculum,’’ he says.
An important part of that is the input of local communities. ‘‘I would be really disturbed if they took away that localised involvement . . . that whole ability of our schools to have a localised curriculum, because that’s what makes our schools so unique and special.’’
Lorraine Kerr agrees. The president of the New Zealand School Trustees Association says ‘‘97 per cent of school boards are doing OK – or well, or very well, or even outstandingly well’’.
In December, she says, just 84 of the more than 2400 boards had interventions in place.
But the reforms are not just about schools under statutory management, says Haque.
‘‘That’s really not a particularly useful measure. Schools under management are right on the extreme end of not being performing; what we’re saying . . . there’s a whole lot of data that’s indicating that too many students are not performing and the potential for us to be world leader, as we used to be in so many areas, has disappeared.’’
Academic Martin Thrupp says what has disappeared is the egalitarian nature of education in this country.
‘‘It would be easy to position the people who have been upset about these [proposed] reforms as having too much skin in the game,’’ says the Waikato University professor of education. ‘‘They’re earning too much money on bringing lots of students into their schools, they’re busy poaching from other areas.
‘‘It is a kind of view that runs through New Zealand society; this great concern about inequality, poverty and so on, but at the same time people who are on the advantaged side of it don’t necessarily want to share their resources.
‘‘Because of that, we do see principals of high socio-economic schools not particularly supportive of redistribution efforts and greater equity funding for low socioeconomic schools.’’
It’s the same for the parents, he says. ‘‘We know the middle class basically cluster their children together and give them an advantaged education; they surround them with resources, and that’s a strategy for social mobility, and what’s happening in the low socio-economic schools is that they’re not getting that.’’
At Linwood, Edmundson sees those ambitious parents and pupils every day, exercising their mobility as they hurtle past his decile 3 school.
That upward mobility puts downward pressure on his resources, despite the extra, limited support of decile funding. Size does matter in education.
‘‘In the years immediately following the relaxation of the zoning regulations, hundreds of middle-class children, with greater economic and social advantages, they left the school,’’ he says.
‘‘Instantly you’ve got fewer children, so there’s going to be staff either having to leave because they’ve lost their job, or staff assuming they might lose their job, so they might jump before they think they might get pushed.
‘‘Schools hit tipping points where once you get to a certain number of kids it’s far easier to offer more choice ... you reach a small size and you’re starting to struggle; it’s harder to have the range of curriculum.
‘‘So you can see these bands of size where natural advantage starts to occur.’’
‘The system has incentivised size,’’ agrees Gregor Fountain, principal of decile 10 Wellington College, which has a roll of about 1750, ‘‘because the funding has followed students and the incentives, particularly around property that come with being large.’’
Fountain understands those ‘‘natural advantages’’. His school benefits from them.
Wellington College is usually at the top of the list when real estate agents promote the merits of a certain area, and in 2017 it earned almost $5.7 million in donations, more than any other school in the country. Many others brought in nothing.
That has allowed Fountain ‘‘to make decisions around overstaffing, to pay for a teacher’s salary beyond the [roll-related] staffing. ‘‘It’s enabled us to sometimes have smaller classes, start new subjects, retain highquality staff.’’
He understands the inequities, but he doesn’t believe students are necessarily bypassing other colleges to get to his, because of the high quality of other schools in and around the city. And he believes it is well supported by a network of former students, who share and support a unique sense of ‘‘belonging’’.
A belonging developed through the gift of greater autonomy in Tomorrow’s Schools.
He is relaxed about the taskforce focus on competition – ‘‘that’s easy for me to say, sitting at one of the biggest and most popular schools’’ – but is concerned about any impacts on zoning and parental choice. ‘‘How do we have a system which is fair that people can go to their local school, but also retain choice for people to go to a different style of education?’’
Smelt agrees. Not all competition is bad, he says, and some of the taskforce reforms could actually increase inequities for those struggling.
‘‘We all know that if you have tight zones, then affluent people will push up house prices in the zones of the good schools and the people stuck in areas zoned for poor schools will not get out. That doesn’t help the poorer parents.’’
Fountain, like many others, is also worried that too big a focus on equity will undermine excellence.
Especially if such a radical shakeup of the sector is not matched by a significant injection of funding, and schools are not allowed to call on their communities for donations.
That could turn Bali Haque into a modern-day Robin Hood, potentially taking from the rich to feed the poor, and a desire for an education system that benefits all, no matter their circumstances.
‘‘Every child in this country should be able to go to their local school and be confident that it’s a good quality school,’’ Haque says.
‘‘It’s a cultural change we’re talking about, people moving from our school to our schools, from our community to our communities. That’s what we want.’’