Katherine Rich MP
National Party Education Spokeswoman

4 August 2007
1400 Embargo

Preparing Students for Life Beyond the Classroom

Speech to National Party Annual Conference, Langham Hotel Auckland.

Ladies and Gentlemen.

It’s great to be here talking about a subject that makes such a difference to Kiwis’ lives.

Since taking over the Education Portfolio from Bill English last November, it has been a steep learning curve, but a huge privilege.

National has a strong education team and I’d like to start by paying tribute to the work they are doing around the country:

Allan Peachey - special education
Paula Bennett - early childhood education
Colin King - trades training
Dr Paul Hutchison - tertiary sector
Tau Henare - Maori education issues
Pansy Wong - international education

I am fortunate to work with such a talented bunch of people.

Education is never far from public discussion.

The reason for that is that every single Kiwi has an involvement in education in some way – even if it is just their own experience at school.

It’s a subject people care deeply about because they know that as a country, if we get it right education can change lives. But if we get it wrong, then opportunities are missed, and there are clear personal and social costs.

At $9 billion a year plus the private contributions we all make, it’s one of the most important investments we make in our communities as parents, family members, and taxpayers.

That’s why John Key has made education one of the three main focal points of his leadership – one of the three Es, along with the economy and the environment.

We share his belief that education is really the only true ticket to self-sufficiency for many people, and a way out of poverty and disadvantage for our nation’s poor.

It’s often said that an Opposition’s default position is to always be negative, to play chicken licken and argue that the sky is falling. I don’t agree. Sure it’s our role to hold the Government to account and point out areas where it is failing, but there’s more to overseeing education than that.

Having spent the past eight months visiting schools, it’s clear to me that there is a lot to be proud of within our education system. However, like the many principals, parents, teachers, unions, and academics I have spoken to so far, I believe there is much progress to be made.

Complacency regarding the status quo is not acceptable. As a nation we have made major progress in the past 30 years.

Schools are totally different places to when most within this room were last before a teacher in the classroom. They look and feel different. Schools are much better at helping children make that transition from pre-schooler to school kid.

There’s not that one-off ‘hey where’s my mother gone?’ experience anymore. There is less formality. I think my generation was the last to experience flag-raising, anthem-marching, dunce-cap wearing, strapping and left-handed bias.

Today, parents are welcomed into classrooms and they can have a much greater involvement in the life of the school. There is a greater celebration of achievement.

I don’t recall a single certificate being given out for anything at primary school. Nowadays, at school assemblies up and down the country, kids regularly receive recognition for something they’ve done during the week. It’s great to see kids get up on stage to be recognised for things like hard work in maths, or being a good classroom helper. Without exception these kids beam and look proud of themselves. Likewise, as parents we all sit there looking as if our child has just been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

More and more schools are using such assemblies as a way of drawing more parents into the life and culture of the school, and therefore the education of their kids.

I know some people scoff at this kind of approach in education, arguing that it diminishes the celebration of top academic or sporting achievement. I don’t see it like that. I buy into the theory that positive feedback contributes to positive thinking in the classroom. If pride contributes to increased engagement, then the student will do better in the long run.

New Zealand’s top students do brilliantly. They can outperform or equal achieving students from anywhere around the world. The Government is quick to point this out in answers to any issue raised about New Zealand’s growing tale of underachievement.

Yes, high-achieving Kiwi kids do well. That’s great. I don’t debate that. But what about the kids who are getting left behind?

Having great statistics about the top percentages of high-flying achievers is no consolation to the one in five kids who finish their school years barely able to read or write.

You’d think that with all Steve Maharey’s upbeat rhetoric things would be forecast to get better. Sadly, even his own officials don’t think that.

According to official reports, by 2020 the percentage of kids leaving school with no qualification at all is predicted to increase, not decline. The numbers failing will rise, not fall.

Officials I’ve asked, excuse this by saying that’s just the changing ethnicity of our school populations. Some genuinely believe that makes the stats okay. Other official reports to Government regularly highlight the issue of underachievement.

In the 2005 ERO annual report, Mike Hollings had this to say: ‘New Zealand’s best students perform with the best in other countries but there is a group at the bottom, perhaps as large as 20 percent, who are currently not succeeding in our education system. Recently released international information shows some encouraging signs of improvement but there is much more to be done. The area where we are least effective is in identifying these students. We need to collect data about them and their achievement in order to find out more about their needs.’

Reports like this, and other respected academic work, underpins National’s policy for achievement benchmarks, more effective use of assessment to direct classroom teaching, and better reporting home to parents.

Our belief is that one of the first steps in reducing under-achievement is to make sure schools specifically identify those students who are struggling. Common sense? You’d think so, although the Greens think that doing this brands children as lifetime failures.

I simply won’t accept this response. When I held the welfare portfolio I met so many teenage dropouts who’d branded themselves failures because they couldn’t read or write. They wished someone had helped them earlier.

The Government should be more honest with the spin it’s been putting on recent figures as an attempt to cloud the problem we have in New Zealand schools.

Take the release of some recent maths data. Steve Maharey skippedy-skips along and tells Kiwis its great that two thirds of all children in their last year at primary school can do addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division at the expected level.

Allan Peachey and I were left shaking our heads at this fairy tale optimism. Here we have the Minister of Education celebrating the fact that one in three New Zealand children leaving primary school can’t add, subtract, and do their times tables well.

Aren’t these things that every parent expects their child to do at the minimum? Figures like these continue to confirm the need for National’s standards policy.

Those kids who get to the end of primary school not grasping the basics will feel increasingly at sea when they hit specialist subjects at high school.

Identifying problems earlier and doing something about it is the key. If we don’t use the available assessment techniques effectively, and use that information to change what goes on in the classroom, we lose precious years when there is an opportunity to do something for struggling students.

Major gains can be made with kids who previously might have fallen through the cracks.

I visited Wakari School in Dunedin last week and that school’s aim is for every child to finish primary school reading at their chronological age. Last year the school achieved that.

In Government we intend to work with all groups passionate about education in the development of our standards and their implementation within the school system. One thing is for sure – we will not aim to increase the amount of bureaucracy and red tape in schools as we implement such policies.

It’s part of Labour’s culture to bog everything down with strategies, blueprints, guidelines, and training courses. Even something as simple as a Fruit in Schools programme has resulted in the development of a mini empire.

I’ll tell you about what’s happened with this programme as one example, but it could be one of many programmes implemented by Government that morphs into a fat bureaucracy.

You’d think a Fruit in Schools programme would be simple. Buy fruit, distribute fruit, children eat fruit. Not so under Labour. An entire bureaucracy has developed around it. Schools taking part are bombarded with pages and pages of documents and handbooks. Boards and principals have to sign agreements with all the solemnity of the Treaty of Versailles, making commitments to do things like: ‘Providing teacher representatives to participate in professional development’.

Let’s bring in a little perspective here.

Schools are handing out fruit, not negotiating world peace or undertaking brain surgery. Days out of the classroom for training is a nonsense. What do they learn? How to affix their ‘fruit monitor’ badge which, yes, they are required to wear! Meanwhile, the principal has to scramble about to find someone to cover the classroom while the teacher is at the fruit distribution training course.

As for arguing that it’s professional development, I have yet to meet a single teacher who is rushing to highlight their fruit distribution talents on their CV.

The school has to buy into ‘evaluating and reviewing FIS activity at a whole school community level and participating in external evaluation for FIS playing an active role in an FIS cluster’’. In English, that means the principal and the fruit monitor have to meet with other fruit schools – why, I’m not sure - and then do a report. More paper.

Schools must also commit to ‘creating a shared vision with school community representatives by identifying strengths and needs’. Shared vision for fruit? It’s all new age bumpf, and frankly impossible for the school to implement.

Parents will buy into visions for issues like numeracy and literacy, but fruit dispatch? Give us a break. The programme needs to come down to earth, get rid of the silly stuff, and use the budget to add more schools to the programme.

Oh, and a quick memo to the bureaucrats: Please send practical fruit. I’ve been told that one school principal was rendered speechless when his school took delivery of over 100 pineapples.

There is a red-tape overload in our schools and we all know they aren’t overflowing with extra resources. All this Wellington-based madness results in less time teaching, more work for principals, and it puts many teachers off taking the top job.

There are many reasons why only 8% of teachers say they aspire to being a principal, compared to years ago when it was seen as a natural progression.

Now, any job has certain accountability requirements, but there seems to be no check on the growing amount of information requested by the Ministry, Education Review Office and NZQA. There should be an impact ruler put over every new idea, which asks ‘what is the administration impact on the school if we ask for this?’ Someone needs to be asking the question.

Take the example of risk analysis and assessment procedures. When a school does something simple like take the kids to the local library or for routine swimming lessons, someone is supposed to fill out a form and identify all the potential hazards. This might prove useful for major events, but I don’t see what value it adds to regular school activities except more administration. It’s a box-ticking mentality that’s getting out of control. What’s a teacher to identify as hazards? Crossing the road?

In a high-trust model we have to trust teachers to use common sense and take expected precautions. No amount of form filling will prevent freak accidents or compensate for plain stupidity – the case where two preschool teachers marched a group of children through the Wellington Tunnel springs to mind.

Policy analysts should think carefully before seeking new information from schools.

Take the recent opening of a new prison in Otago, since dubbed the ‘Milton Hilton’. Some bright spark thought it would be a good idea for all local schools to submit a monthly report to Wellington on how many children of prison staff were in the school. Just another task each month to add to the rest and for what purpose? I am glad that some local principals said ‘don’t be daft’ and the request was rightly binned.

Schools are in a similar situation with Steve Maharey’s tuck shop attack.

National Administration Guidelines are the set of rules that schools follow. Schools aim to follow them to the letter and ERO measures them against those rules. The Government announced a new NAG that said 'where food and beverages are sold on school premises, make only healthy options available’. The wording and imposition on schools could not be clearer.

To meet the guideline there was no way schools could keep the lunchtime sausage sizzle, or sell pies or other basics. The new guideline was impractical for schools and, as one principal pointed out, ‘How can we teach kids about healthy choices when there aren’t any’.

The story started to spin out of control and, by the end of the day, Steve Maharey was issuing those suave smooth assurances that no, no, no ‘only healthy options’ did include pies, sausage rolls, pizzas, chocolate and chips. He said the Opposition was scaremongering and that ‘only healthy options’ could actually mean anything.

That was precisely the same response we got to our concerns about the Government’s so-called ‘20 hours free’ policy which, in some cases, has parents paying more for early childhood education than they did before.

The policy promise in the 2005 election could not have been clearer. In July 2007 all 3- and 4-year-old children would get 20 free hours early childhood education. We all know that the position slithered over time to being one where up to 92,000 children would have access to ‘20 free hours’.

Having access and actually getting it are, of course, worlds apart. It took a long time for people to realise it, because Steve Maharey made it sound so good with his warm co-cooing.

It’s a lot like a game of musical chairs. Technically, all children have access to the chairs, but when the music stops there are only so many who get a seat. It’s exactly the situation that many parents now find themselves in.

The sad thing about the Government’s policy, which said it aimed to increase early childhood participation rates, is that the policy has not brought one new disadvantaged child into a centre. The Government has spent $175 million and none of it is targeted at those who were not already engaged in early childhood education. It’s all gone to kids who were already turning up, so the effect on participation is so far practically nil.

We now have centres charging fees for the free service for things like access to books, music appreciation or additional hours. Others just boldly call the fees what they are – surcharges – and don’t bother to explain.

I am sure Government Ministers are shaking their heads wondering how something that sounded like a winner could end up such a controversial mess. They should have expected it, because that’s what happens when you dream up an uncosted policy in the heat of the campaign. Labour ended up making promises that could never be kept.

Having said that, I do wish Steve Maharey well in his new endeavours in tertiary education. He’s left such a mark on the political landscape. His legacies include iconic expenditure on hip-hop tours, twilight golf, homeopathy for pets and, of course, making the once billion-dollar Television New Zealand the proud little TV company it is today.

Before I finish, more of the Minister’s legacy.

Let me give you an idea of what National intends to achieve by the end of this year.

We’ve already been busy this year. Just to recap, John Key’s covered a wide range of education issues. From food in schools to lifting educational standards. From reducing underachievement and better reporting to parents, to a dedication to trades training in schools.

The Leader will continue to roll out his and National’s ideas for a better education system.

We’ll be putting the blow torch on red tape, increasing student engagement and tackling truancy. And we will be uncompromising in our focus on raising education standards.

That’s in stark contrast to the present approach. Take for instance, one of Smooth Steve Maharey’s lesser known contributions to education.

Under his oversight was the introduction of NCEA Standard 1590 for Level 2 students (in old terms 6th form). It’s a standard for two credits entitled “Prepare and serve hot drinks to patients and/or residents”. Let’s call it the ‘credits for cups of tea’ standard. Delegates will be interested to know that students are measured on whether drinks:

a) Are prepared to patients’ or residents’ requirements (ask whether they want tea, coffee or milo)
b) Are placed in the correct utensil (a cup or mug), and where the patient wants the drink.
c) That are served take into account the patients’ welfare or cultural values.

I’ve consulted Tau Henare on the final point. He confirms that serving cups of tea to Maori, as one example, is no different from serving cups of tea to anyone else. The disturbing thing is that the first two performance criteria completely mirror the Brownie Homemaker Badge that many Kiwi girls of my generation did when we were eight, as opposed to 16 or 17.

NCEA credits for cups of tea do nothing to restore the public’s faith in the exam.

But, hey, I’m an optimist. You never know – that qualification might actually come in handy for all those Labour MPs looking for new careers when they’re shown the door in 2008.

Ends

© Scoop Media