‘Slow to change’ due to complex system
Getting kids back to school and raising achievement rates are the key priorities for the new education ministers.
Appearing before the Education and Workforce Select Committee yesterday morning, Associate Education Minister David Seymour expressed concern about what he described as the “enormously high number of children who are chronically absent from school”.
“If we don’t get these school attendance statistics up, then we are going to find that there is going to be an 80-year-shadow of people who missed out on education when they were young, less able to work, less able to participate in society, and more likely to be on benefits. This is how serious it is.”
Seymour attributed part of the issue to attitudes developed during the pandemic to stay home if unwell, along with other factors, including bullying, and fears of falling behind or being inadequate.
Asked if socio-economic factors impacted attendance, he agreed, saying it was at both ends of the spectrum.
“There are people who take out their kids ’cause they’re well off and they’re in Fiji, and there are people who take their kids out because they are hard up and need their kids to work to put food on the table.”
Earlier in the week, Education Secretary Iona Holsted and other senior ministry staffers also appeared before the select committee for its annual review.
Holsted gave a broad overview of the sector, acknowledging that the education system had failed to address the “plight of education for Maori” and additional learning support provisions needed.
Holsted also faced changes about the number of teachers in New Zealand, which she said made up a bulk of the ministry’s spend, and the ministry’s own workforce, which was said to have increased about 36% or by 1900 people in the past five years.
About 780 of those new hires were described as “frontline workers” providing specialist support to children, with the others also working on important policy areas such as property staff, addressing digital and cybersecurity issues, and the school lunches programme.
Ministry staff were told on Tuesday that some jobs would be cut in response to the Government’s target of 7.5% in savings for their department.
It follows the wake of a Ministerial Inquiry being announced in relation to a pause on some school build projects. Of the up to 350 schools facing uncertainty about whether their school build would go ahead, Education Minister Erica Stanford said she had not yet received a detailed list.
“I was presented with a situation where there is a pipeline of projects that the ministry were unable to deliver on.”