Dear Parent and caregivers

Greetings, tena koutou katoa, talofa lava,

This is not my first message for 2018, hence I do not want to follow my usual newsletter pattern. The reason for this departure  is the intention of  the Education Minister, Chris Hipkins, to review Education in New Zealand for the first time since 1989.

What a good move, especially since he appears to be asking parents, students and actual practitioners to have a major input, rather than a bunch of theorists far removed from the reality of face-to-face teaching of young people.

So, let me do something a wee bit different for you, have a read of the following newsletter I wrote to my community on the 27th January 2010. It is not altered or doctored in any way.

Newsletter to parents. January 2010

Teaching is a particularly rewarding occupation and therefore it is no surprise for me to observe the number of young men in my school who leave us with the intention of entering the profession and devoting their working lives to teaching and learning.

In talking with these young people, I am often struck by the amount of disinformation that they absorb; disinformation that begins with politicians who release it for political (rather than educational) reasons; disinformation that is subsequently slavishly used by headline hungry reporters to produce suitably lurid headlines.

In this light, I humbly offer the following comments.

New Zealand students are learning well; we are producing world class outcomes from our schools.

Therefore, I am tired of hearing that we are failing in educational outcomes when compared to the nations in the developed world.

Studies (such as PISA, the Programme for International Student Assessment), put nations like Finland Hong Kong, China at the top of the educational success ladder.

What is not reported is that Finland is not comparable to New Zealand. The nation is demographically dissimilar and the student-testing conditions are not identical to those in New Zealand.

Yet these results are regularly used to show that New Zealand schools are failing and increased regulations and supervision is needed to bring them up to a world standard that apparently we have fallen short of!

That brings me to the latest farcical effort from the Government:  the introduction of National Standards in Reading, Writing and Mathematics for primary school; standards that are supposedly going to lead to better teaching and better outcomes for children and better educational rankings for New Zealand in the world

Yeah, right!

Here are my predictions:

The introduction of National Standards will not make a blind bit of difference to educational outcomes; other countries with dissimilar populations who sit the tests in different circumstances will still yield better results.

The media will publish league tables that compare New Zealand school outcomes. Politicians will use these league tables for political reasons.  They will not care about the personal and local agony they create.

No one in the media or government will care that the exercise of comparison is absurd because each school has, for example, a unique socio-economic profile.

Politicians will, over time, set up a whole new bureaucracy to supervise the new standards. The cost of this bureaucracy will come off the general allocation of money to educate children. It goes without saying that the schools that “fail” will be punished.

Teachers, over time, will begin to narrow their teaching to the assessment component of the National Standards.

Teaching as a broad rich diverse activity will become less common.

Someday a long time in the future, a “David Lange” leader of a new government will say to their party, wouldn’t schools do so much better if we simply removed all the rules and regulations, slashed the bureaucracy gave the money to schools and let them react as only they can to the needs of their respective communities?

- John Laurenson

I do not claim to be prescient, but my words from 2010 ask a question every bit as relevant for 2018. Have we, in Chris Hipkins found a person who will remove endless rules and regulations, slash bureaucracy and fund schools so they can react to and meet the needs of their communities?

I certainly hope so, and I invite you to get involved by making your opinions heard, loud and clear. It's my hope that if I am spared another seven years, I can look back and say, in 2025, that in 2018, we had a person and a government who listened to what the people said and who subsequently got it right.

It’s been a long time since anyone has been able to say that!

Regards

John Laurenson