New Government- Opportunity or?

Bay News November 26, 2008.


With the hype of the recent elections dying behind us, we now look to the future under a new Minister of Education, Ann Tolley. Over the last nine years there have been large gains made in education in a reasonably stable period that has been free of industrial strife. This period has allowed teachers in all sectors to focus on lifting the educational achievement of students, especially in literacy and numeracy. There has been a tremendous amount of good will amongst teachers to spend a considerable amount of their time on professional development, improving teaching strategies, making better use of assessment data to inform good teaching practice, and to raise the achievement of Maori students.

The new National Government has signalled that they wish to continue this work in lifting educational achievement, keeping students meaningfully in education until eighteen and supporting the lifting of Maori achievement. The concern we have as educators is that so often in our experience, politicians come enthusiastically into a new portfolio with generalised goals that have been created in their own imaginations or with misconceptions about what is actually being done in education. It is not as if teachers, young and old, have been sitting on their hands waiting for some politician to tell them how to do the job, or that they have a good idea that teachers have not yet thought of.

There is immeasurable good will in teachers to work with governments to lift New Zealand to the top of international league tables. In the International PISA tests, New Zealand ranks in the top five countries in literacy, numeracy and science. We recognise that there is a long tail of underachievement amongst our students, and we have been working hard to rectify this. A new Minister of Education has a great opportunity to work alongside teachers to achieve a shared outcome. What will be disastrous will be for a new minister to come in and tell teachers how to do their job or to revisit thorny old issues such as bulk funding and the abolition of zoning. We need to maintain the focus on lifting standards and providing teachers with the resources to do this.

There are six issues I would like the new Minister of Education to address:
o Increase the funding for our special needs students, with adequate resourcing for staff and facilities
o Support the introduction of the new Curriculum with more time for teachers to prepare units of work that embrace all of the essential elements of the document
o Better resource schools to meet the day to day operation and maintenance requirements
o Fund staffing to reduce class sizes
o The bulk of New Zealand schools were built in the 60s and 70s. There needs to be a huge injection of funds to modernise old buildings to create flexible learning spaces and to allow students to access the necessary technology for 21st century learning.
o There needs to be a consideration given to a range of alternatives for students to continue their education up to 17-18 years. Planning within communities to address their needs is more important than trying to find standard solutions for the whole country.



The new minister has signalled worthy goals for education in her first three years as Minister of Education. It is our hope that she will take time to identify the excellent programmes that are being taught in schools and give schools the resourcing needed to build on these. Any imposed strategy will not work and be doomed to fail just as the “No Child Left Behind” programme in the America has failed for George Bush.