Behaviour action plan disappoints

Media Release                                     

December 8, 2009

Behaviour action plan disappoints
 
Details of the long-heralded Behaviour Action Plan were released last night, with little new to offer secondary students, says PPTA president, Kate Gainsford.

“While we knew it was always going to be difficult for the Ministry of Education (MOE) to shape something comprehensive out of a nil budget, it is disappointing that - having entered into the process in good faith - there is so little progress to report to our members.”

Special education funding is being reshuffled to fund the action plan initiatives – most of which will target early childhood and students in their first years of primary schooling, Kate said

“Early intervention is proven to be cost-effective, as is intervention early in the life of the problem, but some problems have their onset only with adolescence, she said.

“We are left wondering what might become of the students this plan seems to have left in the ‘too hard’ basket.”

In the same year that the MOE advised government to slash support for alternative education, there seemed to be nothing in the plan to target effective intervention for the most challenging five percent of teens in schools, she said.

“Of course communities can continue to rely on teachers and schools to do their best with these complex problems, but we expected better. Better services must be made available to all schools. Teachers, students, and their families, deserve the issue to be treated with a greater sense of urgency than is being shown by government.”

“The initial aim of the Taumata Whanonga was to engage cross-sector support and reach agreement on ways to improve behaviour that affected students’ learning. There was little or no disagreement about what was necessary, but plans for the school sector are half pie when they fail to include significant improvement in secondary school support,” she said.

“This plan once again relies on teachers and schools to deal with complex problems – a move that the government’s own advisory group on conduct problems has already said is simply not good enough. In five to 10 years secondary schools might be able to see positive outcomes from these programmes.  Our question is whether secondary schools and their communities can afford to wait that long?”

ends
 

© Scoop Media