Kiwi kids worth investment
THE star of the Labour Party conference in Dunedin last weekend may have been its charismatic leader, but the major policy announcement she made deserved its own headlines.
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced the country’s schools will get 600 new learning support coordinators, who will work alongside teachers to support children with unique and challenging needs. The policy is budgeted to cost $217 million.
Ms Ardern said New Zealand needed to give all children, no matter their demands, ‘‘the best start in life possible’’, while freeing teachers to ‘‘do what they do best’’ with the rest of their classes. That she is right on both counts should not be widely disputed. That this is as clever an economic policy as it is a social one may not be so obvious.
Comparing running a country to running a business is some thing often done, and often criticised. A country exists to wrap a collection of people sharing a defined piece of land into a single cultural and economic entity, and then make that entity — both as a whole and as myriad individuals — as successful as possible.
A country can point to a lack of corruption and the happiness, health, safety, education and security of its citizens as measures of success. These are somewhat esoteric notions and are notoriously difficult to measure.
A business, too, aims for success, but that success is almost entirely judged by profit — which is comparatively easy to measure.
While there are differences in running businesses and countries, there are similarities too. Prudent investment is arguably the most obvious. What to invest in, how much to invest, and how and when to raise the required capital can be the making or breaking of a business or a country.
It is easy to see investment as the acquisition of material assets: better machinery; better tools; better roads; better hospi tals. But in business and stateleadership alike, the investment into people is often of more value: getting the right people; supporting them; keeping them happy; keeping them growing and improving and adding value.
How does a government do this? In the short term, clever immigration policies and the training and retraining of adults. In the long term it can be done through the support and education of children. To hijack the wellknown All Blacks mantra, better Kiwi kids will make a better New Zealand. And while the family home should always be the primary place of growth and support for any child, the classroom is undoubtedly of immense importance.
Our children face their first day at school with an ocean of potential in front of them. The country’s teachers are entrusted with shaping that human potential into something resembling the best it can be. It takes decades, for the most part, to really see the fruit of that investment, decades before a policy like that announced by Ms Ardern can be held up as a success.
But it is exactly the sort of investment New Zealand needs. All parents know a classroom is filled with mostly agreeable, well socialised children plus a few who find schooling far harder. And it is those few who often soak up a disproportionate amount of teachers’ time.
Will targeting the needs of those children mean better outcomes for them far into the future? Perhaps, though without a control group it will be impossible to ever know for sure. But it can only be a positive that teachers will now spend more of their time and energy on the students who are ready to learn within the group.
While questions remain about the details and implementation of this policy, very few will be questioning its worth. Better educated, better understood and better cared for children will surely mean more valuable adults in the future. And that can only be good for business.