In the blue corner

Alongside the cost-of-living crisis which is seeing New Zealand households pay through the roof for the basics, it seems we are also in the midst of an education crisis.

New Zealand kids used to be in the top 10 in the world for reading, maths and science – we well and truly punched above our weight. But over the last two decades, achievement levels of Kiwi kids have astronomically dropped, so much so that many of them are now leaving without the basic reading, writing and numeracy skills.

Unfortunately, our education system has significantly deteriorated over the last five years. To give students the skills to reach their goals, we have to address the school attendance crisis.

Statistics across the last five years show regular school attendance fell from 63% in 2017 to just 39.9% in term two of 2022. Even more unforgivable, is that more than 100,000 Kiwi kids are still chronically absent from school. That means they are missing three out of every 10 days – up from 38,000 in 2017. Even worse that than, 7750 are completely unenrolled altogether – up from 3000 in 2017.

Plummeting school attendance rates over the last five years is not only a social failure, but it is undoubtedly contributing to a future economic crisis – because we are not adequately educating our kids to reach their potential.

Labour needs to get its priorities straight. Instead of spending money recruiting overseas teachers or changing the immigration settings to allow new teachers into the country, they have hired 1500 new staff at the Ministry of Education. Almost half of these are backroom managers, policy advisers and administrative staff.

Why are we not spending that money on frontline teachers to ensure that when our children leave school, they have the basic knowledge and understanding to compete with the rest of the world?

Despite spending $5 billion on education, we are failing our kids, with much lower attendance, and poor results.

A National-led Government would ensure accountability for regular school attendance by setting explicit expectations for schools and parents. Non-attendance of children in school would no longer be an acceptable option.

We will ensure that our immigration settings are balanced in such a way that we can get new teachers into schools and invest in them, so that when kids get to school they are learning and reaching their potential.

We must ensure we get our education system right.

Not only does our children’s future depend on it, so does New Zealand’s.