Planning for education’s future
It is not too surprising to hear National education spokesperson Nikki Kaye disparage the Government’s major education announcement as ‘‘another day, another review’’. Obviously this is the Opposition’s script. But there may also be personal reasons for Kaye to sound so frustrated. Her own promised education overhaul was lost in the pre-election noise of 2017 and has now been consigned to the dustbin of political history.
Few will remember Kaye’s dream of ‘‘modernising’’ the education system. But to call the Labour-NZ First 30-year plan for education just one more review is unfair.
The overhaul or stocktake – or review, if you insist – will be the biggest reform of the education system since Tomorrow’s Schools in 1989. As one of the last major acts of the fourth Labour government before it collapsed due to ideological incompatibility, it increased local autonomy for schools, most obviously with the board of trustees structure, and paved the way for the competitiveness of the 1990s.
How will we manage to hold onto the baby while we throw out the bathwater? Parents like their boards of trustees. They like the idea of local input, the democratic running of schools and the sense that governance ties their children’s schools to their communities. Many parents’ direct experience of the Ministry of Education may lead them to prefer the status quo rather than seeing greater ministry control at the local level.
But there is no question that competition between state schools is destructive of the education system overall. If Education Minister Chris Hipkins can find a way to convince parents used to three decades of the ideology of ‘‘choice’’ that their local school is the best, he will have done well.
Those hoping to see action, not talk, will have noted that Hipkins has already been decisive in what is traditionally one of the most fraught of portfolios. Tertiary students have started 2018 with a year of free fees and increased allowances.
National Standards has gone from primary and intermediate schools after eight years and it would be hard to find many teachers or parents who would mourn. Parents quickly grasped their subjectivity as an instrument to measure and compare educational progress. League tables that rely on secondary schools’ NCEA results are seen as equally useless. A separate review is looking at the future of NCEA.
Charter schools have been harder to kill off, with Act leader and charter school enthusiast David Seymour keeping their plight in front of the media. They will evolve into a new, hybrid form but the ideological experiment is over.
While the coverage this week has focused mostly on schools, the Government’s reforms will also take in earlychildhood education, tertiary education and vocational training. This is ambitious.
An education summit in May should launch a national conversation but Hipkins has already summarised the new approach as an end to a narrow focus on standardisation and measurement, and all the red tape that involves. Critics will accuse him of ushering in a teachers’ union utopia, which might overlook the fact that teachers are usually in the best position to know what works in a modern classroom and what does not.