EDTalkNZ

Well the storm over whether New Zealand had a “world class education system or not” got eclipsed by the real thing in the US as the week went on. The NZ Herald waded in this morning and told “education commentators” what amounted to grow up and get over it.  I was a little saddened about their taking to all education commentators because I have diligently pointed out over many years that our enthusiasm for what we are doing in education needed to be tempered a little by the reality of achievement, especially when diced along certain lines.

Of course we do good work, that has never been the issue but to want to hide behind the world class claim is more than a little immature.

But chatting with a group yesterday we concluded that New Zealand rather liked to be able to make claims which engender enthusiasm for our view of ourselves but which become a little ragged when scrutinsed. The following were mentioned.

We have the best race relations in the world!

Certainly we work at them a little more than others and usually much more constructively. But to want to make the claim that we have the best race relations in the world is to enter a very dark place. What does it mean? What are the measures? Equity of educational outcomes? Demographic profiles of our corretional institutions and the clients of our justice system? Perhaps it can be measured in health, employment and housing statistics?

If it simply means that we do not often stand in the streets hurling abuse at each other then …. What about the incidents in the Jewish cemetry in Auckland recently?

Clean Green New Zealand / 100% Pure!

There are increasing calls for us to challenge this. Surveys show that our rivers are pretty dodgy, so are some of our swimming beaches. There is constant worry about mining, deep sea drilling, fracking and other such activity which suggests that for a variety of reasons there may be imperatives that are stronger than any commitment to Clean Green NZ or to 100% Pure.

This is a pity because primary schools often do good work in the areas of environment responsibility.

New Zealand is  great place to bring up children!

Well it ought to be, there is so much going for it. There is nowhere far from the sea, the grass grows green, the cities have open spaces, we commit to universal access to education and work hard to achieve universal equity in outcomes (but see above) and so on. But when I look back to when I was a child (cue in the violins and the soft focus cameras – black and white please) I note that we had a more comprehensive system for looking after babies – ante-natal and post-birth, that schools provided health checks and the free milk symbolised the commitment to feeding our young ones. Health camps were there for those who might benefit from a break from circumstances that were perhaps not helping and they varied widely – people bought postage stamps to help pay for them.

Family life was stronger as parents were free generally from work at weekends and could spend time with young ones.

And….. while there probably was hidden abuse of children, the scale seems to have gone well past the level that open-reporting could have produced. We never heard of youth suicide as a phenomenon, alcohol abuse by young teens. And there was no such thing as boy racers – it is hard to loose traction on a Raleigh bike!

So it is worth asking – is New Zealand still a great place to bring up children?

We are a great sporting nation!

I think we do possibly “punch above our weight” whatever that means. And recently the All Blacks were challenging for a record number of test wins, a record held by that famous rugby nation, Lithuania. But what if we measured our greatness as a sporting nation by sheer participation – how do we stack up then. Well, probably still pretty well. What if we measured it by the physical health of the nation? What if we measured it in terms of the big sports in world terms – football, basketball, golf and tennis? Still quite a good effort here. Olympic Games – OK?

We all need our cuddly blankets and New Zealand needs more than most perhaps given its isolation and its still difficult new orientation to Asia and the Pacific rather than the Old Country and Europe.

But as a friend of mine in London says – “You should be OK in New Zealand. After all, if you have an issue you can all get together at the weekend and sort it out!” That might turn out to be our real strength when we reach the point of recognising it. So I propose a new generalisation.

Small is beautiful!

Is that a trick or a treat?

Stuart Middleton
EDTalkNZ
10 September 2012

The continued debate about the use of unregistered teachers, this time in the Partnership Schools, seems to me miss the point of the real issue.

On one level it is clear that people who work in schools should be subject to a set of criteria that ensure so far as is possible, the safety of young people. The importance of this is constant at all levels but has increased intensity with the younger students. Police checks, established identity and perhaps other tests of character are important and a “registration” process is one way of maintaining a standard across the education sector.

But when the demand that teachers in schools be “registered” is code for a view that teachers in schools should have qualifications from the current set that typifies teachers then the argument breaks down. If the educational outcomes of schools is to change, and I hear no arguments being pursued that this is not the case, then we do need to think through the question of “who should teach in schools?” This is not the same as saying that all teachers in schools be registered.

With younger students there are many schools in the country that would benefit from having a wider set of language skills reflected in their teaching staff. Te Reo Maori, Pacific community languages, the languages of migrant groups are all very special in their contribution to the language development of young members of different communities and to the richness of an education in New Zealand for all young students.

Teachers trained in the Pacific who have fluency in both English and a Pacific community language are available and would add greatly to the effectiveness of education in linguistically diverse settings. But the current registration process seems to get bogged down because of its pre-occupation with course approval. (Health has the same issues.)

At the secondary level, much of the work currently being done indicates that many students when offered the opportunity to engage in what many still persist in calling “vocational education” (so as to mark it out from “academic education”) will make better progress and reach higher levels of attainment across the board. But this requires teachers who have a different career trajectory from the traditional school to university and back to school track that the conventional qualifications imply.

Such people do not sometimes meet the criteria for “registration” because of the courses they have undertaken. But they are needed as teachers and given a “clean” background ought to be able to work in schools without financial penalty

At all levels there are roles for people to work in different ways to contribute to effective education outcomes. Short bursts of input in specialist areas, the instruction in specialised settings that broaden the education experience, and specialised contributions from people whose lives are spent predominantly outside of the school and such other people all have contributions to make. They are, if their backgrounds are appropriate, “fit to teach”.

This all adds up to saying that teaching requires a set of people with wide skills to bring out the best in a set a young people with wide needs, interests, aptitudes and capacity to make progress.

I promised some more snippets from my recent reading about Finland.

There are in Finland five kinds of teachers who work with students in the K-12 part of the education system:

1.     kindergarten teachers working in the one year kindergarten programme (age 6) prior to starting school (age 7);
2.     primary school teachers responsible for years 1-6 (age 7-13) in the 9 year comprehensive schools (they usually teach at one grade level and only teach several subjects);
3.     subject teachers working in the upper levels of the basic school (ages 14 – 16) in the subject disciplines such as maths, physics, chemistry etc;
4.     special education teachers working with individuals and groups  throughout the comprehensive schools;
5.     vocational education teachers working in the upper secondary vocational schools.

So perhaps Finland has built into its system greater diversity. But there are some tough requirements too. All Finnish teachers must hold a Masters degree, introduced in the belief that teaching was a scholarly activity that should be based on research. Interestingly, there is only one teachers’ organisation in Finland to which 95% of all teachers at all levels from kindergarten through to university teaching belong. This implies a parity of esteem that we have yet to achieve.

Believing that we need a wider group of people in teaching does not lead to an inevitable loss of standards but rather could lead to a general increase in both standards and quality both in terms of input through teaching and outcomes through learning. With what we know about the importance of teacher quality, this bears thinking about.

Stuart Middleton
EDTalkNZ
4 September 2012

I was chatting with some people the other day about IT and the various contacts we had made back in the 1980s as a result of what was happening then. I had spent a year in England in 1982-83 and had been astounded to see the extent to which English teachers were using computers. The BBC has put a lot of resource into developing a machine for use in schools. I returned home with the BBC Serial B and, for the kids a Sinclair Spectrum.

At the same time an appointment had been made to the Secondary Teachers College of a “Computing” specialist – radical stuff. The use made of the machines was pretty ordinary. Because you have a plethora of fonts each page in a publication had a plethora of fonts on it. I amazed others by using a computer to print out letters to the marking panels of examinations that I ran and so on. Back in 1993 there had been murmurings of all this IT stuff and what schools were doing.

But it was in 1993 that excitement mounted when the Ministry of Education decided to take a great leap forward. As the financial year was coming to a close there was still $2 million in some “furniture fund” in Wellington.  It was decided to have a competition – these days it would be called a “contestable funding round”. Secondary schools were invited to submit proposals for how they would advance IT in the school if they were successful and secured one of four grants of $500,000.

Aorere College, Decile 2, South Auckland, where I was principal at the time, was one of those four lucky schools.

To cut a lot of few long stories short – the first thing the MOE did was to deduct GST from the money when it was paid across – some things are traditions that cannot be broken! The teachers then worked with energy to advance the ideas they had earlier promoted in a more sketchy fashion in the application. The total now required was about $2.8 million.

Clearly there was not enough money so a breakthrough was needed. It came when the staff realised that we would only get there if we based our plans on the needs of the students and if we worked together, across department boundaries, across classrooms, across each of  those boundaries that in institutions mark territory won and therefore territory to be defended.

A lot of very good things happened. Some of the issues that are still with us emerged early on. Which platform should we go with? The answer was all three – PC, Apple and that wonderful platform the BBC or “Acorn” as it had become known by then. It was a great pity that this platform disappeared because it was very sound in its appreciation of learning. It had been a wonderful presence in England and I twice visited their headquarters in Cambridge UK, on one occasion to see how they had developed a network across an entire school community. It was a pity that their risc chip was so good that they turned to servicing the global mobile phone industry and moved out of computers!

One big difference between what we tackled back then and what seems to be happening now is that there was a clearer attempt to advance the curriculum through the use of IT rather than have IT become the curriculum. And there was a heavy emphasis placed on the uses of IT in industry and commerce. For instance the engineering department installed CNC technology, Geography used devices for measuring atmospherics and undertook real studies for the local authority, Social Studies had access to the urban planning data of the City Council, Commerce ran the Business Centre at the International Airport – all real world use of learning that still evades so many young peoples’ school experience.

And we had fun, teachers undertook PD in critical IT skills and worked towards getting the “IT Warrant of Fitness” – the mood was buoyant. Has it all got a little too serious? Well, cheer up and just imagine if Dr Seuss had written the computer manual!

                        If a packet hits a pocket on a socket on a port,
                        and the bus is interrupted as a very last resort
                        and the address of the memory makes your floppy disk abort,
                        then the socket packet pocket has an error to report

                        If your cursor finds a menu item followed by a dash,
                        and the double clicking icon puts your window in the trash,
                        and your data is corrupted ‘cause the index doesn’t hash,
                        then your situations hopeless and your system’s gonna crash!

                        If the label on the cable on the table at your house
                        says the network is connected to the button on your mouse,
                        but your packets want to tunnel on another protocol
                        that’s repeatedly rejected by the printer down the hall,
                        and your screen is all distorted by the side effects of gauss,
                        so your icons in the window are as wavy as a souse,
                        then you may as well reboot and go out with a bang,
                        ‘cause as sure as I’m a poet, the sucker’s gonna hang!

                        When the copy of your floppy’s getting sloppy on the disk
                        and the microcode instructions cause unnecessary risk,
                        then you have to flash your memory and you’ll want to
                        RAM your ROM,
                        quickly turn off the computer and be sure to tell your mom!
 

(Author unknown – but I am pretty sure that it was not Dr Seuss!)

Stuart Middleton
EDTalkNZ
24 August 2012

The review of the Teachers Council is timely as another teacher indecency case hits the headlines – about the only time the Teachers Council has a public profile.

I have long argued that teaching in  New Zealand will never achieve true professional status until it had control over entry standards to teaching, a system of maintaining a disciplined system with members observing high standards within the framework of a code of ethics.

The Teachers Council on its establishment looks a little as if it might achieve this but it hasn’t.

I have noted over a long period that bodies brought together that consist of representatives of other organisations seldom achieve effective levels of activity. There is a good reason for this. A group made up of representatives of other organisations is simply a random collection of people. The Teachers Council agenda becomes distorted by the agendas that the members of the Council bring with them.

Members of the teachers Council should be a mix of professional educators of great experience and of considerable standing in the community appointed or perhaps even elected through an electoral college system

The question of entry standards into the profession is a key matter for such a body. Having determined a set of standards for entry they should then apply them at the point of entry. It is an absurdity that the Teachers Council gets involved in initial teacher education programmes. They should be approved by CUAP or by NZQA and the only question with regard to programmes should be whether the candidate for entry into the profession has undertaken such an approved course. There will of course be other critieria I would hope that go beyond mere training.

The registration process is cumbersome. The provisional registration system is simply a bit of nostalgia from the old days of the inspectors who would finally give the stamp of  approval. The process for re-registration should be the confirmation standards and should be rigorous for all teachers.

Re-registration should not be the tick-the-box process that it has become. It should be a point at which we should show the professional development that has been undertaken (the qualtity of which might well be laid down), the refresher training that is required (perhaps every 10 years), the meeting of expectations for improved qualifications, and suchlike. This all seems to me to be part of the professional requirements of being a professional within a profession.

The Teachers Council might also be supported by an Education Commission (along the lines of the Law Commission) that could provide professional advice and commentary on the system and its performance – an ongoing source which would continually nourish the system with ideas and challenges.

The Teachers Council might sponsor a set of Teaching Excellence Awards – perhaps under the aegis of a charitable trust in the way the UK does.

In other words the Teachers Council review must lift the level at which the Council works so that it is able to provide leadership to the profession of teaching.

And that raises a final question. What is the “Teaching Profession”. Well, it is certainly those who teach in the early childhood and schooling sector. But what about the tertiary sector? I think not in general terms but as the boundary between secondary and tertiary education becomes very “jagged”, to use the PPTA term, and students are not so easily identified as “secondary” or “tertiary” there are questions (which is not the same as “issues”) about who should teach.

Finally, where do the costs of a Teachers Council come from? They come from the same place that other professionals pay – our pockets. The difference is the capacity of legal and medical professional to pass the costs on to their businesses. No doubt there would be a discussion about this!

Teaching has an opportunity now to realise professional status through a revised Teachers Council that could itself achieve a level of professionalism that has eluded teacher organisations and principals associations.

Stuart Middleton
EDTalkNZ
6 August 2012

So now they are to known as “Partnership Schools / Kura Hourua”. Jolly good because that is what a school, any school, is meant to be.

But the further detail about Partnership Schools / Kura Hourua (aka Charter Schools) released emphasises flexibility and freedom and details the areas in which these freedoms will exist as curriculum, qualifications, employment (code for who gets to teach), hours of operation and school leadership.

It is something of a sad commentary that it is thought that such a development is necessary to give expression to freedom and flexibility when any school in the country could operate with these freedoms and flexibilities had they a mind to.

The curriculum in New Zealand is permissive and expressed in broad terms open to local interpretation. But experimentation and innovation in curriculum design is still the exception and not the rule that it should be. The secondary schools can develop pathways and emphases that both better meet the needs of students and give character and identity to the school. Some of this is now happening through the academies and none more so than the health academies that are giving a shape to science and mathematics for many students.

That secondary schools have chosen to reinvent the old examination system using NCEA is entirely a matter of choice on their part. The compression of NCEA into a three year annual cycle is neither necessary nor in the best interests of students. The flexibility is there waiting for schools to exercise it. New programmes, multilevel study and new qualifications are all made possible by the National Qualifications Framework and the National Certificate of Educational Achievement – Charter Schools will not introduce flexibility other than by starting with a clean sheet and being freed from the old ways of working and having perhaps personnel who bring different thinking to the task of designing a programme.

As for hours of operation has always been a little piece of silliness where two hours before lunch and two hours after lunch constituted half-days and terms were twelve or so weeks long and there were three of them and then for no reason that was obvious there were four of them. It is high time that students in schools were treated in an age-appropriate manner with regard to attendance and this suggests that the daily fixed-hours regardless of activity might not be as appropriate to senior secondary school students as it is to new infants.

Corralling students into schools for fixed hours only creates the pressure on schools of occupying them regardless of the usefulness of what they are doing. Students in secondary schools should be there when they need to be – I already hear the swelling tones of protest that they would vote with their feet and not be there. Let’s set out to have them vote with their minds and be there so as to continue along pathways that brings them success and the prospect of a future that is both within their grasp and that they want.

That leaves two areas – employment and school leadership.

The suggestion that people other than a registered teacher might teach in a school brought out some protest pretty quickly. I rejected as amusing the suggestion from the leader of a national organisation that such a move would threaten New Zealand’s reputation  as having a world class education system. Could a “small number” of schools threaten the reputation of 2,548 schools which the same leader would claim are excellent?

And we easily forget in these discussions the not insignificant role played by people with a limited authority to teach in our schools. Schools rely on them to varying degrees. Interestingly, I could not find on the web the exact number of such teachers – would it be 10%? Schools need a variety of people as teachers and as the curriculum expands, as it must, a greater variety of skills and knowledge will be needed. If there are to be meaningful relationships between secondary and tertiary providers there will also have to be greater variety in who get to teach the students.

School leadership. I would imagine that the key leaders in these Partnership Schools will be educators with the support of people with other complementary skills required to run effective operations. This reflects what already is happening in many schools especially large schools. The real impact on leadership will be at the governance level which has proved to be problematic over the past 23 years. Providing the kind of informed governance leadership for such large organisations is a huge opportunity to strengthen the leadership at a Board level of these important public “companies”.

That leaves one area of opportunity where flexibility will certainly not only be required but also essential – student achievement.

The only clear reason that we should contemplate a “Partnership School” in New Zealand would be if it could clearly raise student achievement among those who currently do not succeed. It will require firm leadership from the government to see that this becomes the key criterion by which a “partnership school” proposal is judged. If it will simply provide a different opportunity for students who already are successful then the whole development will turn out to be without purpose or honour.

Stuart Middleton
EDTalkNZ
1 August 2012

It was not done lightly when they named the parts of Berlin after the Second World War that had come to be considered as exclusive property of this super power or that super power, “sectors”. The Americans had the American Sector and the Russians theirs. Movement between the two was restricted by that ghastly wall and Checkpoint Charlie became synonymous with freedom of access.

They had, after all, the lessons to be learnt from education where sectors had similarly become territory won and territory to be defended. The No-man’s Land was territory to dispute and little consideration was given to what is best for the citizen / students.

I was astounded that recently a one-day seminar on relationships between sectors with top presenters was offered by a reputable Australian organisation, ATEM, but was able to attract only 7 registrations from throughout Australia – well, it might have been six because I had registered.

Issues related to educational sectors and to relationships between them in Australia seemed to me to be an issue that demands attention. Especially in the tertiary area where chickens hatched in the late 1980s have all the appearance of coming home to roost. In New Zealand they also demand attention.

Relationships between higher education, further education, vocational education, academic education are simply beyond resolution by considering them each to belong to a “tertiary sector”. And just as the spoils of war are commemorated and held to be holy long after the fighting stops, much of the sector debate in education is based on the spoils of past wars and the now somewhat jingoist slogans of the factions – We are academic, protect the standard!  We are vocational , they need us to dig for victory! We are primary, we teach people! We are secondary, we teach subjects to people!

It is all nostalgia for a past age when education systems had the appearance of working. Let’s face the realities of peacetime.

The transitions between sectors has become dysfunctional with too many students successfully navigating through the checkpoints which have become chokepoints. The old academic / vocation distinction no longer applies. Education systems in Anglophone countries are characterised by unprecedented rates of failure and dropouts – casualties of this war. These countries all share the dilemma of skill shortages and increasing youth unemployment.

Lets calmly look at these sectors. Early childhood education is critical to later success in education and while we boast of pretty good national levels of access, the disparity of access between certain groups in the community is a less happy picture. A solution would be to subsume the ECE sector into the primary sector thus increasing the ease of access without increasing the need to escalate governance and capital works costs. Australia in ahead of New Zealand in halving the K Level entry group but this seems to be more of a Level 0 for primary than a dedicated pre-school effort. And one year is too short.

All systems know the importance of the primary, elementary part of the education system. The issue with this sector is that it is not encouraged other than through mechanisms of name and shame to have a successful but more narrow focus on the teaching of basic skills. I am not suggesting that we return to the old inspection when an Inspector of Schools would arrive at a school to hear the students read to ascertain whether Standard 4 or 5 or 6 had been achieved. But clear statements about exit levels would help with the critical platform that is primary education.

Where the primary sector has identity issues is at the upper end when it seems to grapple with the dilemma of being like a primary school but wanting to be like a secondary school. The solution is clear, create a new sector, Years 7-10, and let them get on with the job of making a successful transition from primary into the discipline-based secondary style programme. Introductory work on real pathways would replace the current work that is reduced to dabbling by the lack of clear pathways with continuity into post-primary education and training.

This would mean taking the senior secondary school out of the “school” sector and placing it in the “tertiary” sector. Having reached Year 11 students would have multiple pathways for further education and training which would be both, and simultaneously, academic and vocational. The different institutions of the senior secondary school, the university, the ITPs, Wanānga, PTEs ITOs and so on would then have a distinctive contribution to make to providing appropriate pathways, rich in their diversity, rewarding in their outcomes and  connected to the real world of family sustaining incomes, of employment and of continued learning.

A brief flypast over the battlefield cannot do justice to a complex issue but the general point is clear. Our current sectors have developed by accident not design, they have resulted in the development of distinctive features (unions, qualifications, sites etc) that are more intended to distinguish territory than they are based on what we know about learning and young people.

I would love to have got together with those six people who shared my enthusiasm for starting the conversation about sectors and the relationships between them. Who knows, it might have led to change somewhere ahead of us. One day the public will want to push the walls over. How much better it would be if we could do it before contempt for institutionalised education reaches that level?

Stuart Middleton
EDTalkNZ
30 July 2012

Let the games begin!

The Olympics have started again with an opening ceremony awash with the usual clichés about how taking part is more important than winning. If this was on a billboard then just to one side would be an emphatic “Yeah, right!”

Sport has a very close relationship with education and plays a big part in schools. I personally do not think that enough emphasis is placed on the role of sport in education.

We all know that playing sport is a very good way for young people to grow in a healthy way and to learn elements of team work, reliability, personal responsibility and the like. It is also an important part of developing pride in a school.

It is my view that top secondary school sport should be organised on a national basis, played in conferences, televised and lead to national results. Not all sport of course. That is not the real world. While Tiger and Adam battle it out on some prestigious golf course, countless millions of plodders chase the elusive little white ball around courses all over the world. No, I am talking about elite sport. There would continue quite a lot of sport at lower levels just as there is now.

Sport New Zealand might be much better off and have a greater impact and enjoy increased support by investing most of its money in promoting elite sport in secondary schools – athletics, swimming, rugby, football (both men and women), cycling, hockey, rowing and basketball would be a good place to start.

Then after the secondary school level national sports competitions were in place, attention could shift to developing a national “college sports” programme based on the eight universities and the six largest polytechnics. This would be a winner just as it is in the US. Quality sport played in conferences then culminating in the playoffs would be a much better bet than unseen school sport and struggling provincial efforts to attract interest.

Above these levels the national elite ranks would emerge and the top players would proceed into the increasingly franchised scene that is top sport.

The point about college sport was driven home to me one cold night at UC Berkeley. It was half-time in a football game and a parade of the universities top sports teams was taking place. The commentator assured the audience of 80,000 that “no sports person is parading tonight who hasn’t maintained an 8.5 grade point average.” There is a connection between quality in sports and quality in the classroom. There is a connection between pride in the sports and pride in the school. 

Teachers carry a cruel burden of having not only to maintain excellence in terms of teaching programmes but also are expected to maintain the sports programme. Both matter but little investment goes into the sports programme compared with the teaching programme.

If resources for sports were deployed much more evenly across our schools, performance would also be much more even. It is not only the quality of the sports people that allows some schools to reach and maintain elite performance but also the size of the resource that is invested in those schools. A fair share of sports resources for all schools would see that sports talent and performance does not respect decile levels!

This would provide a lift for the entire school system as pride in school increased, as talent in sports crossed over to performance in the classroom.

Because , like the Olympic Games, when it comes to education it is not the taking part that matters as much as the winning. High performance in learning is also a matter of training, good preparation, sound coaching and putting together on the day as they say.

Making sports work for education can only benefit everyone. And getting serious about sports in schools and “colleges” (universities and large polytechnics) would add value to our system of institutionalised education which too often, like our sports, disappoints when it comes to results.

Stuart Middleton
EDTalkNZ
26 July 2012

We often get greatest wisdom about education from people outside of education and the recent statement from Hon Tim Groser was just another instance of this.

“All New Zealand students should be learning te Reo Māori,” he said. No ifs no buts.

His reasoning was that in a global world that is multilingual we need a community that is linguistically able to operate with ease and comfort in a range of language settings. He is of course right in this.

Students who can and do learn French and German are also developing a language facility that has these characteristics but is less useful in terms of the fabric of Aotearoa New Zealand.

Bilingual brains are better brains and only a very small number of countries speak only one language. There is that old quip that if you speak many languages you are multilingual, if you speak two languages you are bilingual and if you speak one language you are English. There is some truth in this as the pattern of monolinguals is more aggressively present in English-speaking countries than in others. Well, that used to be true but it has been challenged by two key features of the world we live in.

There has been a world-wide resurgence of indigenous languages in that set of Anglophone countries. This phenomenon would have been unthinkable in the 1950s and 1960s when it was thought that speaking a language other than English was an educational handicap. We now rejoice in this country in Māori medium television and radio, in availability of te Reo Māori printed media, and in a younger generation which generally has an ease with the notion that New Zealand has two key languages and three official languages.

The young ones are very different in this respect from the older generations who still phone talkback radio to campaign about the signing of “two anthems” or write to the newspaper complaining when it has printed its masthead in te Reo Māori to mark the start of te wiki o te Reo Māori.

The other key change is the pervasive migration of it around the modern world. In New Zealand our language landscape has been greatly enriched by the presence of the languages of the Pacific, by languages from Asia and Europe and India and many other communities. We are the better for this and a student who has learnt a second language is more able (and willing) to tolerate other languages and even a little more disposed to relate to cultural difference. In short, the fabric of our community is improved when students learn a second language.

Migration has both enriched us by the importation of other languages but also challenged us. We must urgently address the issue of teaching mother tongue languages to our New Zealand linguistically different groups. Urgent in this regard is Cook Island Māori and Niuean. But Samoan, Tongan, and soon Chinese will be pressing for urgent attention. Why wait until language facility is lost before reacting?

But let’s deal with the question that the second language to be learnt should be Māori. Well, it makes sense. Many living languages are now used across the spectrum of daily life across New Zealand. That is not to say that each and every home uses it, far from it, but a student learning has to make very little effort to have contact with it. Furthermore, learning a second language is known to have an impact on ability with the first language.

Why is this? Well the act of learning a new language is the process of constantly asking the questions (to oneself): In what ways is this new language the same as or different from the language I know? In what ways does this language work that are different to the ways the language I know works?

If we want high levels of language ability in our community we need to have a goal that each and every student would learn a second language and In New Zealand the argument that this should be Māori is compelling. Now what about the question of how long should this learning continue. I would argue that it should continue for all 13 years of compulsory schooling after having started in pre-school. Language ability continues to develop and grow and the way to best help this is to be consciously studying two languages – for most students this would be English and Māori, for others it is best to be the community language of the home and English (e.g. Samoan and English, Tongan and English).

Back in the 1980s I was on a Form 6 & 7 English Syllabus Committee that proposed a language programme in which English was compared with Māori – the theory was that such a linguistic study would increase a student’s knowledge about language and have the added benefit of it being about two languages that were firmly bedded into New Zealand. There was wide support for it until the politicians got hold of it, aided and abetted by a small group of teachers who resisted change not only in this matter but in most. David Lange, PM and Minister of Education at the time, lost his nerve and sacked the committee. That made that language issue go away – or did it?

E ngā Akoranga.  Akohia te Reo nā te mea he oranga kei reira.

Stuart Middleton
EDTalkNZ
16 July 2012

Like many others I too have had a bit of a holiday. Well, more of a change of routine.

First I was pleased to host Gary Hoachlander, CE of ConnectEd in San Francisco. He is developing approaches to “linked learning” in which themes are driving programmes. It is similar to the our Vocational Pathways but more sophisticated in that the focus is clearly on professional and industrial sectors with significant sector-related content and work experience. But like our Vocational Pathways such pathways remain flexible. The New Zealanders who heard Gary speak were impressed with this glimpse of secondary education in the future, well now really.

The notion of “multiple pathways” is really catching on. As a concept it is rather simple. That is because the object of education is relatively simple – to take a young person from a state of being someone who does not know and cannot do the many things valued by society to a state of high competence in knowledge (of literature, values, philosophy, science, mathematics, and so on) and skills (of employment, citizenship, parenthood, and personal growth).

Having said that the simplistic view that there is only one way in which this can be achieved is increasingly challenged. The notion that all young people will thrive on a similar diet of education for fifteen or even twenty years defies the evidence that suggests that as education has become increasingly homogenous in the past thirty or so years it has become increasingly obvious that this one-way approach suits only some.

Systems all around the world are worried about the levels of drop out.  A Forum in Wellington two weeks ago on Multiple Pathways was told that 50% of 9th graders (our year ten) in major US cities drop out. Our own New Zealand evidence suggests that perhaps between the ages of 15 and 24 as much as up to 30% of people are dropping out of education and training leaving them without a level of skill and knowledge that will see them secure in their futures.

I was up in the Pacific during the week and each island nation I visited wanted to know more about Multiple Pathways. Across a wide range of settings, secondary schooling is not sustaining the interest and engagement of students. To be fair to secondary schools, this is not a recent phenomenon because it never has, or to put it more accurately , it has never been expected to. Until relatively recently (the mid to late 1970s, students had access to “multiple pathways” – opportunities both inside and outside of the school.

Offering technical and commercial courses in essence did what vocational pathways will seek to do but were a little more aggressive in the connection to employment. Leaving school at age 15 early and officially, to enter employment and generally with it opportunity for work-based training as well as education through night classes and technical institutes.

Technical and commercial and agricultural subjects were available in some schools, students left at age fifteen to continue in apprenticeships and other trade training options such as night school, cadetships, workplace learning and so on.

The Pacific nations are now facing the issues we face – how can they get students to stay in school, to achieve useful qualification to acceptable levels and then make a useful contribution to their island nation.

And the same principles apply there as they do here in New Zealand.

Some students simply need an earlier exposure to trades and applied education in order to both maintain momentum and to develop a purposeful attitude towards learning. Even in those small economies the links between schooling and what is possible after schooling finishes is critical. Some will proceed to further education and training, some will enter employment and others will return to the informal economy. The scale is different but the challengers of all this are as great.

But one thing is clear. Education systems that developed the comprehensive academic high school model as the staple diet of education and training are now faced with change. This includes the big anglophone systems and those that have followed them or have been encouraged to do so.

We live therefore in interesting times but we are not on our own.

Stuart Middleton
EDTalkNZ
28 June 2012

Is peace is breaking out in education?

The Minister of Education has announced the formation of a “Minister’s Forum” that will address the key goal confirmed last Monday in the Better Public Services goals: that by 2017, 85% of all 18 year olds in New Zealand will have NCEA Level 2 or its equivalent.

The Forum contains possibly the widest representation of education ever put together in one room. All major groups associated with pre-school, primary and secondary schools are there. So too are various governance groups such as trustees. There are some tertiary people also.

Chaired by the Minister, this group might be the best chance yet to effect the step change that will take achievement for all students up to levels that are competitive internationally and which will see increased contribution into the wealth of New Zealand.

The goal is that all 18 year olds will get there, not just a cosy percentage but a challenging one, And not only the Asian and European students but also Maori, Pasifika and other priority groups – it is 85% of each of these groups. No longer can our disparate performance be hidden in global percentages.

This is all good news. Yes the timeframe seems tight but the goal is beyond dispute. It represents something of true north for us to stroke some direction into the system. And what a great time of the year to set our eyes on a new star.

I say our eyes because a step change of this kind requires effort from everybody.

The foundations of education are constructed in family and early childhood education, well quality early childhood education. (A further Better Public Service goal calls for 98% participation in quality ECE). This then must lead to a primary schooling that focuses clearly and effectively on the foundational skills of education. We can no longer afford the luxury of having young people present themselves to the secondary school after 8 years of primary education still carrying weaknesses in basic skill areas, especially literacy and numeracy.

In an education system that is keen to boast that we are a “world class system” it makes no sense that students can slip through untouched by the teaching of these skills.

Then the secondary school takes over and faces several issues – keeping students in education and keeping them moving forward. Actually keeping students in education is also becoming a concern for senior primary levels. Progressions from secondary on to further education and training are also a challenge. Why are the transitions such an issue in our system?

The challenge for the secondary schools is on a number of educational fronts and seems to me to be clustered around the following:

•           the development of pathways that clearly relate to further education, training or employment;
•           a return to increased opportunities for some learners to respond to the challenges of learning in applied settings;
•           closer co-operation between schools and tertiary providers both in the interests of increasing pathway options but also to re-introduce the rich opportunities for technical, career, and vocational education that once available to young people.

It seems to me that the 85% challenge will require us to bring new success into the educational lives of about 10,000 students, But the bigger challenge is that if the 85% target is to apply equitably to groups of priority learners, over 3,500 of this group must be Maori and over 1,000 Pasifika.

People from overseas, when I talk about such matters, are amused not by the gravity of the challenge but rather by its scale. With numbers such as those above, surely, they argue, you can get in there and “knock it off”. They come from systems in which the same issues have almost reach a scale of despairing numbers. In the US, a student drops out of High School every 9 minutes and 1.4 million a year are excluded.

World class? Of course we can be. Not just in measures of overall achievement (that after all is simply a league table!) but in our capacity to show that we recognise inequality of outcome and were prepared to do something about. To not achieve or get close to this target would be shameful.

EDTalkNZ welcomes the Better Public Service Goals for education announced by the government yesterday.

The goal of 85% of students achieving NCEA Level 2 or its equivalent is an entirely reasonable goal even if the time for getting there by 2016, is a very tight and demanding one.

To reach this goal we will have to bring success to an additional 10,000 students who currently either do not reach this goal or who disengage from education too early. The big task is that over 50% of those 10,000 students will be Maori and Pasifika if reaching the goal is to be done in an equitable manner.

The current level of disengagement from education by students under the age of 16 years suggests that reaching the goal will require:

•   a greater emphasis on multiple pathways allowing students to choose different pathways with different emphases than is typically available now;
•   earlier opportunity for students to find success through applied vocational education;
•   an increased willingness for schools and tertiary providers to work more closely together to provide mixed qualification pathways in which the NCEA Level 2 goal is reached in combination with industry recognised qualifications;
•   increasing the capacity of Youth Guarantee Programmes including trades academies, secondary / tertiary interface programmes and increased numbers of Youth Guarantee Free Fees places which allow students who wish to build on their progress in school through being able to enter a vocational qualification programme without having to stay in school for all of the three years of NCEA.

But above all, we can reach this goal if we put our minds to it and this will require two big efforts. We will have to work together across traditional boundaries with a focus on the student rather than the sector and the institution. We will have to reflect the diversity of students by admitting to a variety of approaches that will allow them to meet the goal.

So it’s up to us rather than them.

Stuart Middleton
EDTalkNZ
25 June 2012

It’s a disconcerting thing, reading the newspapers these days. Often during the week it is a quick scan of the morning paper, a quick go at the crossword and then off to work. The morning paper is given its serious attention in the evening.

At the weekend I look for instantaneous relaxation a more leisurely stroll though the papers.

Well, on Saturday I open the paper to be confronted by a large advertisement from the Auckland Primary Principals Association advising the public at large and readers in particular that they were against league tables in education! Some reasons were given and readers were exhorted to email the Prime Minister, the Minister of Education and their local MP all of whom would obviously be astounded by this spontaneous outburst of opinion from the community.

Most people in the community simply add this to the list that they have of the things that teachers and Principals do not believe in: national standards, performance pay, league tables and this is just the recent list. Oh yes, the teaching profession makes it very clear to the community of what it is they do not believe in.

But I wonder if members of the wider community have any idea of what educators in this country actually do believe in? And do they understand the arguments behind those things.

All they have to go on are the results that stare them in the face and they don’t need the media to tell them about these in specifically schooling terms, they know that as a result of the failure of education to win the hearts and minds of young people, they see unprecedented juvenile crime, they see escalating youth suicide rates, they see escalating issues of mental health among younger and younger people.

They know with some precision how well we are doing in education and while half of the community celebrates success, the other half despairs at what seems to be gloomy futures for their young ones.

I was put off my stride to relaxation when I came across an article that cast doubt (perhaps even aspersions) on the B4 Schooling screening test in the Sunday paper.

The Ministry of Health describes the B4 School Check as a valuable check on development and the picture of the child’s development is gained through some simple health checks and a conversation between the health professional, the ECE teacher and the parents/caregivers. All this sounds all very well, sensible and useful. But the article goes much further and gets into the speculation that the check was more sinister in its potential to get into areas of mental health and start diagnosing mental health issues in the young. This is much more problematic than simply identifying issues of hearing and sight, and nutrition and general physical development as the old Plunket checks once tried to do.

More interesting was the introduction of what seem to me to be unexceptional child behaviours as symptoms of mental health issues – shyness, sleeping with the light on, clinging on to parents’ legs, being nervous in new situations. If these are symptoms then we have all been in that space!

And this raises the issue of over-diagnosis. There is a view that this is happening. It was staggering to be told in the article that “Pharmac figures show a 140% increase in anti-depressant prescriptions for 0 – 4 year olds” within the space of one year and an increase in “mood-stabilising drug prescriptions for children aged five and over”. Can this be true? And if it is, is it the 4 year olds who need examining or should the older generations be taking a good long look at themselves.

To some extent there is as much danger in glamorising or normalising issues such as depression as there is in ignoring it. But the free and easy manner with which we see diagnoses of serious issues such as dyslexia, autism, ADHD and so on bandied about helps no-one. Young people grow up in many different ways and the strength they have to develop into “normal” youth is one of the miracles of life.

And it might be a good thing if young people grew up a little more along the lines that we grew up. We did not expect to be happy all the time and were loved when we were not. We had no idea whether or not we were normal or not and perhaps at my age still do not know!

I grew up being afraid of violence and fighting to the extent that I would hide behind the seats in the movie theatre while the cowboys were fighting (to be hauled up when it stopped by my brother who knew no such fear). I was nervous about being left alone. No-one offered me a pill! Is it normal to get tense in an airport? Or to worry about an unfamiliar sound outside at night? I do, but no-one thinks I need a pill?

Major issues such as youth suicide reflect the serious decline in the security of youth, their exposure to drugs and alcohol, the instability of so many homes (often no fault of the parents), the pressures placed on young people to compete and now things like cyber-bullying

These are real issues. It would be a good thing if people knew what teachers do believe in and had faith that this would make the world a better place, especially for their young ones.

Stuart Middleton
EDTalkNZ
19 June 2012

The Prime Minister thinks it a good idea that parents have more information about the schools their sons and daughters go to. Who could argue against this? It seems reasonable, in fact it is almost a right I might have thought.

But the trouble is that while each of us individually is beyond reproach in the use of information, we don’t trust the other bloke. Of course they are going to misuse it. Of course they are going to use it for purposes that are not proper. Worse, the other bloke is going to construct a league table!

What added to the fire on this occasion was that the comments from the PM came  on top of some discussion with decile rates – the ultimate league table if ever I saw one. Decile ratings drive the quest for houses in Auckland and parents ascribe the power of holy writ to  them. There is no room for a reasoned discussion – high decile rating good, low decile rating bad. And this is whipped up even more by the exhortations of the real estate industry.

So who is kidding who in the discussion about decile ratings and information about school performance?

Decile ratings were devised to help schools – we would come up with a formula that assessed the factors that impact on the degree of difficulty in teaching and learning and which depress the differences made explicit by talk that compares rich and poor, black and white,  leafy suburb and suburb under the power pylons, and so on. I remember thinking at the time that this was real progress. At last a measure that reflected the accumulative nature of disadvantage.I also recall the promises that such a formula would allow funding to be allocated fairer.

But it didn’t take long before I started to have doubts. The school of which I was Principal at the time was denied access to a programme and membership of what became the AimHi Group, because “it was Decile 2″! My best efforts to show that in fact the school roll of about 1,300 could be clearly divided into a Decile 1 school that was as large as several of the smaller schools in the programme and a Decile 4 school. The Fallacy of the Decile was exposed. At the very top of the decile scale, a school is as homogenous as its decile rating would suggest. At the bottom it is as evenly disadvantaged as the rating is meant to show.

But in between is something of a dog’s breakfast. The rating is simply the blended assumption of what the school would be like if everyone who went to it was the same. Those schools in the middle have a huge range of students in them that is not captured in the “think of a number between 1 and 10 game.

But let’s put the issue of the decile rating to one side and get back to the issue of information. Of course information about the schools should be available and it should be on some basis that looks objective. Wait, is that possible?

The Government has faith in the National Standards – the teacher organisations do not. The truth will as always be somewhere in the middle. the information will be as good and as accurate as the school makes it so it is in their interest to do a good job that is fair to the students and reflects the good work being done in the school.

In Australia the government set up the website www.myschool.edu.au for members of the public to get a snapshot of the schools. I took a look at it and found it to be helpful. It seems fair and I certainly got a good feel for the school that the grandchildren go to. I wouldn’t say that it represented a threat to anyone.

For the fact is that middle class parents will continue to compare schools in making choices about where their little ones will go. The genie is out of the bottle on that one. And generally the schools that do well out of it love it. Let’s be honest about it. They are flattered that so many scramble to get through the gates and they dine out on it at the drop of the hat.

It is not what others will do with information about schools that should worry us. It is what we do to ourselves and each other. And there could be protections in law about using information to construct league tables – I think that New South Wales has such restrictions.

But it is the league tables in the minds and hearts that does the damage.

Meanwhile, if the information is there and tells us that some schools are struggling and in some cases might be able to be expected to do better, why aren’t we using it to address the issues?

Stuart Middleton
EDTalkNZ
14 June 2012

The Government is currently tinkering with the role of local government through the Local Government Act 2002 Amendment Bill[1]. The key change being sought is to redefine the role of local government. The clause in the Local Government Act 2002 that they wish to replace is:

”to promote the social, economic, environmental, and cultural well-being of communities, in the present and for the future.”

They want to replace it with:

“to meet the current and future needs of communities for good quality local infrastructure, local public services, and performance of regulatory functions in a way that is most cost-effective for households and businesses.”

In other words, the role of local government is, according to those who promote this change is rats, rates, roads and rubbish.

This is a great pity because the growing interest of local government in education and social outcomes has become the example being trotted out to justify the change. The previous Minister of Local Government, Nick Smith, prior to being driven out of the Cabinet Room by the dark comedy that is the ACC, became strident in his criticism of the Auckland Council – “what are they doing having targets for NCEA and all that!”

Well put simply, they are reflecting government policy, supporting it and stating that their region will also commit to those goals. In fact the early drafts of The Auckland Plan, by including the NCEA Level 2 target was actually running ahead of the Government target subsequently established in the Better Public Service Targets of having 85% leave school with NCEA Level 2 (or its equivalent) by 2016. Perhaps the development of good public policy is a shared responsibility rather than being a process driven by officials and party politicians who are often remote from the realities of the towns in which people live in?

The Manukau City Council, back in the 1990s, set about to provide a set of policies that would enable the Council to advocate for its citizens. The resulting Economic Development Policy, Employment Policy and Education Policy documents all led to material improvements in the well-being of those living in the south of Auckland. And this at a time when the input of central government was having little effect.

In education, the Education Policy led to establishment of the City of Manukau Education Trust (COMET) which contributed a range of significant developments – Youth Transition Services, Youth mentoring, Family Literacy for example – and became a major partner of the Manukau City Council in advocating for improved access to early childhood education and suchlike. At the end of this month and in response to the new local government arrangement in Auckland, COMET will become the Community Education Trust Auckland and extend its activities over a wider region.

The education goals in The Auckland Plan are improved access to early childhood education, NCEA Level 2 and a postsecondary qualification. These are entirely synchronous with Government Policy. Why then have such goals? Because by committing to them the Auckland Council can then report on the success of the central education system in achieving them in Auckland. Advocacy on behalf of its citizens is surely the key goal of local government. Is it the scenario of the central government being answerable to local government for outcomes that startles the ponies in Wellington?

And local government is ideally placed to promote integration and co-ordination of education within its areas. The Auckland Council has established the Auckland Tertiary Education Cluster – an organisation that can bring together the tertiary education institutions of Auckland in a way that goes beyond the reach of the Tertiary Education Commission and the Ministry of Education in effecting collaboration and co-ordination. Having institutions seek ways of working together is surely in the interests of central government, indeed it might even be its policy!

There are other examples of effective activity by local government – Otorohanga and the work of the Council with local youths on successful transitions from education into training and into employment springs to mind. How can that not be government policy? There are other examples. Perhaps local government throughout New Zealand should be making their local members more aware of what they are doing.

It is not that local government through a commitment to education and social outcomes is setting out to do the work of central government. Rather it is more a case that local government has a role on behalf of its citizens in seeing that central government does its work! Advocacy for the needs of an area, the welfare of its citizens and the general health of communities is both local and a central matter.

Education is greatly enhanced by the activity of local government in working alongside the centres, schools and institutions of their respective areas. It is not a good time to be arguing that central government alone and on its own can do the job.

(Note: The Local Government and Environment Select Committee has not called for submissions on this Bill.)

Stuart Middleton
EDTalkNZ
11 June 2012

Over the summer I read the recent biography of Steve Jobs (Walter Isaacson). It was a good read about a uniquely eccentric, effective leader who changed our world in so many ways. There are lessons here for education I thought as I read it. Often I find books not about education teach me more than those that are! It would be good to summarise those and now Isaacson comes up with a little summary of those ideas (HBR, April 2012). (The bold works at the start of each paragraph is the Steve Jobs thought – the rest is my musing about their application to education.)

Focus.   From time to time we need to stop and have a serious rethink about direction and emphases. We need to withdraw regularly and renew the focus, not keep on doing the same old thing, working out what we want the education system to do, expressing it simply then doing it requires such focus.

Simplify.    Get the focus right and we find that what we need to do is simpler than we thought. I have long argued that education is not the complex process we make it out to be. What we want is simple and achieving it could also be simple.

Take responsibility end to end.   This is one that education might use to plan its attack on educational failure. Just as Jobs sought seamless integration in the devices he developed, so too should we be seeking seamless integration in education. With the current disintegrated system no-one can be responsible for educational failure because there is no oversight “end-to-end” of a learner’s journey.

When behind, leapfrog.   Thinking of the step to take after the next one and then going straight to it gave Jobs an advantage in business. Perhaps in education we need to think of the next big step and then the one after it and go straight there. Perhaps tinkering inside the existing sectors is not as profitable as thinking about what comes after the current sectors.

Put products before profits.   Seemingly this belongs better in a business world than in education. But, as a colleague reminded me recently, if we were to see that the products are our students (and the community is our customer) this becomes somewhat applicable.

Don’t be a slave to focus groups.   Public opinion and mob-think is not a good basis for planning. Jobs epitomised the freedom of the free thinker and the daring of some-one who was not afraid of be ahead of the general thinking that guided his industry. We need this sort of leadership in education, not the status-quo seekers

Bend reality.   Steve Jobs was described by a fellow employee as having a Reality Distortion Field (so-called because of an episode in Star Trek where aliens could through mental effort change the thinking of others). Having a capacity to think clearly (and forcefully) about what might be takes “impossible” out of the lexicon. We generally say “that’s impossible” or “that can’t be done” when really we mean “I am having trouble thinking that through.” Leadership in education needs to “bend reality” at this time more than ever before.

Impute.   The messages we give to the wider world about education have a profound impact on how they see our world. Jobs ran plenty of honest, hard-hitting sessions behind closed doors but his communications to the world imputed all the right things about what Apple did and what Apple produced.

Push for perfection.   What is perfection in education? Simple. Each and every student succeeds.

Tolerate only “A” players.   This seems obvious. But to achieve this we need to have greatly increased focus on professional development throughout a career in education, tight and high entry standards, a focus on achieving equity in teaching standards across and between schools and a clear notion of what constitutes an “A” player when it comes to teaching and educational leadership.

Engage face to face.   Education is good at this generally. Communities can engage face to face to their school. Education leaders have skills of such engagement. The quality of this engagement is genuinely two-way. That’s the goal.

Know both the big picture and the details.    The best leaders know both the big picture of education and the details of getting it right at the level of that individual student. It could be that we are better at the second than the first – we know the skills of the trade but are less clear about the business, strategy and performance, the bottom line.

Combine the humanities with the Sciences.    But overall the Americans maintain the ideal of a general education more successfully than we do – it’s just that so many students in the US fail. Successful educations systems have sorted out what a general education means and as a result have programmes that are broader yet more focussed.

Stay Hungry, stay foolish   This is the key. Those Apple advertisements in the 1980s and the exhortation to “Think Different” introduced us to the concept. Since walking into the Apple HQ in Cupertino CA in 2000, and seeing the Apple Creed splashed large across the entrance wall I have found it to inspire and encourage.

Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see the world differently. They are not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.

References:

Beahm, George (2011)      I, Steve Jobs: Steve Jobs in his own words, Hardle Grant, London

Isaacson, Walter (2011),    Steve Jobs, Simon and Schuster, New York

Isaacson, Walter (2011),    The Real Leadership of Steve Jobs in Harvard Business Review, April 2012, Cambridge MA

Stuart Middleton
EDTalkNZ
8 June 2012 

Now that the “alliance of education sector groups” formed to fight “government cut-backs in school staffing” appears to be out of a job, I suggest that they stay together and tackle some of the other big issues. This “unprecedented meeting of six school unions” as it was described would bring together a strength usually only seen in New Zealand when such “coalitions of convenience” are formed – and that is not very often.

Given that the issues of the number of teachers in our schools can galvanise all these groups to cooperate and to seek a common goal, it is exciting that that these key education groups are finally sitting around the table when there are even greater issues to be tackled and perhaps this togetherness is the start of something good. The factionalising of education at the school level has been in no-one’s interests for a long time.

Here are some suggestions for concerns that such a group might focus on.

Educational Failure

Why in an education system that has teachers capable of producing students educated as well as any in the world, do the statistics of education failure continue to resist improvement?

Teacher Professional Development

Why in an occupation which is dedicated to learning do we have so few opportunities for teachers to refresh and expand their own learning? Especially in light of the agreement that central to improving learning is the quality of the work of each and every teacher.

Sectors

Why do we continue to have such clear demarcations between early childhood education and primary, primary and secondary, secondary and tertiary? Do sectors any longer serve young peoples’ learning? Should early childhood education be merged with the primary sector? Should a middle sector be created (Years 7-10)? Should the senior secondary school be merged into the tertiary sector?

Funding

Why in a state education system should schools operate with disparate levels of funding as government funding is distorted by community contributions, fees and donations? Is too much funding locked into inflexible provision of staffing? What are the true costs of a sound educational provision?

Technology

Do we really have a national strategy for the use of learning technologies in schools? Will the use of devices in schools be left to the whims of parental wealth and availability of funding? Will schools be in a position to respond to the roll-out of high-speed broadband?

Curriculum

Is it timely to initiate a review of the curriculum in order to clarify gaols and objectives at key transition points, to remove from the curriculum the clutter that has developed and to give priority to key skill areas that are necessary to see all students succeed? Is it time we got serious about teaching community languages?

Transitions

Why do transition points cause disruption for many students? Are transitions in the right place? Why is it so difficult for us to manage students as they move across transition points?

Skills / Employment

Have we taken our eye off the ball? Is there a developed diminishing focus on skills required for employment or a disconnect between schooling and employment? What is the role of schooling in creating job ready young people? At what ages should the vocational purpose of education and training become explicit. Why do we have skill shortages and yet so many young people doing nothing with their lives?

School Location

Do we have the right number of schools and in the right places? Has the location of schools changed in response to the demise of the horse and unsealed roads in rural areas and changed urban behaviours?

Disengagement

There is agreement that disengagement from education is becoming (has become?) a systemic feature of education in this country. Teachers and school leaders tell me that they see it unfolding over many years in the schools. Do we understand this phenomenon? Do we know what interventions might work and when to apply them?

Any or all of these topics would benefit from a response as intense as that given to the teacher / student ratio issue. Each of these issues can only be addressed by a non-partisan and system-wide response. Each of these issues will continue to dampen educational success among our young people until they are addressed.

Actually, put together they might well make a good agenda for a Royal Commission on Education. Just imagine if we agreed to this in this the Diamond Jubilee Year – it could be referred to in years to come as the Diamond Jubilee Royal Commission on Education – that has a ring to it.

Or will each group return beat a retreat back to their camps to continue the battles another day and in their own way? One skirmish might be over but the war continues against ignorance, a future of doing nothing, educational failure and poverty.

Stuart Middleton
EDTalkNZ
5 June 2012

Considering that New Zealand is a constitutional monarchy and that the events of this week are of some historical significance with regard to the monarchy, I wonder what  schools are doing with regard to the celebration of the Diamond Jubilee?

My mind goes back to the ascension of Queen Elizabeth II to the throne 60 years ago. I was in Year 2 at that time and activity was ceaseless. We drew crowns, got given fold-out things about the State Coach (vehicle not football), actually was presented with a medal that commemorated the event, was taken by bus to the picture theatre to see a film of the coronation mere days after the event – it was a big event in schools.

But those were very different times. Paul Holmes refers to our generation as having been brought up in the shadow of the Second World War and I know what he means. It was a much more jingoistic time and although “we” had won the war the cost was high in both human terms and financial terms.

They were also rather simplistic times and I have long thought that this was due to the myriad slogans that were part of the war-time discourse and which stayed around for quite some time. “Freedom is in Peril”, “Your Courage, Your Cheerfulness, Your Resolution Will Bring Us Victory”, “Keep Calm and Carry On”, “Careless Talk Costs Lives”, “Dig For Victory” were all known and acted as shorthand for some aspect or other of behaviour during war-time. Even some that seemed not to be about war had their origins during that time – “Coughs and Sneezes spread diseases” for instance.

And the “Empire” or what was left of it by the 1950s was a key organising principle of what we learned. South Africa, Canada, Australia and of course the “home country” itself were all topics that occupied quite a lot of our time – especially drawing the flags! School cadets were still in place in the early 1960s when we were in secondary school.

As a young boy I was on Sundays used to listening to the Listeners’ Request Session which had many nostalgic songs from the war, stirring military marches played by brass band and not the reedy military outfits and, on Sunday evening there was a “Diggers Request Session” that was weekly listening. This was wall-to-wall songs from the war period. And so it went on.

Shining through all this rather solemn stuff was our young Queen who we lined up on streets to see, were taken by bus from school to join all the other school children in Hamilton at some park to have her drive up and down the ranks waving demurely while we did what we were supposed to do.

We also knew what the Poet Laureate had to do – write verse for occasions. I think we even learned the rather forgettable verse that marked the failing health of King George Sixth:

Across the electric wires

The urgent message came

The king is not much better

In fact he’s much the same.

I couldn’t vouch for the authenticity of this but how on earth do I know it?

So here we are 60 years later and the world has changed – not quickly and for much longer than we have acknowledged. Peter Ustinov famously tells of going to school for the first time in England – There was a large oleograph on the wall of a classroom of Jesus Christ holding a boy scout by the hand and, with the other available hand, pointing out to the boy scout the extent of the British Empire on the map. Put it down to my foreign background if you will, but I was pretty sceptical from the start.

The red on the map of the world had long dwindled and then all but disappeared. But some things didn’t change. John Osborne summed it up well in a scene from Look Back in Anger when  Alison Porter’s colonel dad rues the changes to the Empire – “At the time we thought it would go on forever” – to which his daughter replies “You’re hurt because everything’s changed and Jimmy’s hurt because everything’s stayed the same”. This sums up the mood that was to prevail.

Unlike Australia, there is very little talk in New Zealand of replacing the monarchy with a republic. That might be because it isn’t an issue or, if it is, we still remain pretty divided on the issue. There are still sections of the New Zealand community who would regard such talk as treachery! Like changing the flag!

On the other hand we are a constitutional monarchy. The founding agreement for our country is between tangata whenua and the synecdochial crown, an arrangement that means much more than mere symbolism.

I thought that the elevation of the Duke of Edinburgh to the Order of New Zealand was a kindly act towards an old fellow – harmless in its implications and even rather gracious in its thoughtfulness. A bit like giving great grandfather a new set of slippers. The carpers were I think a little ungracious.

In a country where there seems little reason to party other than after a test match, the Diamond Jubilee seems a good excuse for a party for the little ones and I hope schools have felt able to.

And in amongst it all there could be also a little learning. I am a little surprised at the impact of all that we did in those years about all this stuff and how it has stuck. Then again, arriving in Great Britain for the first time many years later and many years ago, I realised that my education had prepared me to live in England rather than New Zealand! Some things change for the better.

Stuart Middleton
EDTalkNZ
31 May 2012

I got my first job when I was about eight years old when my brother and I, during the school holidays, worked for our Uncle in his grocery shop. We got ten shillings a week, had our own aprons and generally did useful things such as sweep the floor, make up bags of flour, help get the orders together and subsequently take turns in going with Uncle Les in his quaint little van to do the deliveries.

I am pretty sure that this, being a family arrangement, did not involve the IRD.

But such an opportunity was important because later, aged about 12 or 13 years I continued with an after-school job – i.e. each day from about 3.30pm to 5.00pm and during the school holidays, I had a similar set of responsibilities working for Mr Frame in his hardware store.

None of this was remarkable in those days. Young people delivered the newspapers, worked in shops, mowed lawns and so on. I thought that somehow this had all gone by the wayside as adults, seeking work, had replaced young ones doing such activities.

My daily newspaper is delivered by an adult couple driving a car – she doing the driving and he putting the papers into the letter boxes. Franchises galore have captured the lawn market and you never see young people appearing in shops to do the after-school shift.

But apparently it is not quite so. The discussion of one of the tax changes in the recent budget, brought to light the fact that 68,000 “children” were working in paid employment. A recent report shows considerable employment among secondary school age people with some working considerable hours. I recall that the recent discussion of the “truancy” statistics for NZ schools mentioned that part-time employment was a factor.

It therefore continues to puzzle me that the default position for so many young people is to head towards degree study and a place in occupational classes that are seen to be prestigious often in defiances of the evidence of progress being made as a student. One might have thought that all this “employment experience” might have encouraged more to head towards the skill areas in which there are continuing shortages.

Yesterday’s Dominion Post newspaper reported a survey that showed that nearly half of Kiwi employers are struggling to find staff with the right skills. Apparently the global average for this is 34% and for the the Asia-Pacific region, 45%. So we are a bit on the high side.

The skill areas that were listed in the top 10 for NZ were: engineers, sales reps, trades-people, IT staff, technicians, accounting, management, food and beverage, marketing / PR / comms and drivers. Some of these categories require degrees but not exclusively. The IPENZ President, Graham Darlow, is quoted as saying that “the biggest shortage is in technicians and not professional engineers.”

Time and time again the message is the same – New Zealand needs young people coming into the workforce with middle level skills in areas such as those listed above but also with the skills of employment.

Central to this is the accruing of experience in real employment on the way through – informal experience as a young person, more formal as the point of full-time employment approaches. Getting ready to work is a gradual process that requires growth – qualified on Friday and into the workforce on Monday with no previous experience is not palatable to many employers.

I am told time and time again by employers that they respect the qualifications young people have but, and it usually runs along these lines – “they aren’t ready to work”.

I reflect on my own experience as a worker – a little grocer’s lad, a hardware store assistant, a drain-layer, an assistant sexton in a cemetery and a musician – all woven around the journey towards a qualification and a subsequent job which in my case would be to teach. I am sure that the wages I got as a little worker were not an excessive drain on the businesses I worked for. I also guess that later when in university my holidays spent as a drain-layer were more productive.

But I do know that I learnt a lot from those experiences which these days would be called the skills of employment – working hard, following instructions, being able to work in a self-directed manner, getting there every day on time regardless of weather, saving money and learning to mix with a very wide range of people.

Looking back the experiences were invaluable. Perhaps the time is right for a national campaign to offer young people such informal and formal opportunities in the interests of getting the nation cracking – getting people into work that is there by having young people growing up with an expectation that working is what you do. But it is going to take an effort from everyone.

Stuart Middleton
EDTalkNZ
30 May 2012

It took a little time but now we seem to know what is happening.

•           School teacher / student ratios are to change.
•           The intermediate school additional staffing allowance is to continue.
•           No single school will lose more than 2 teachers.

What a shame we didn’t get it all on the table at the beginning, then the explanations of the changes and the responses to it might have made sense to the public.

Based in 1 July 2010 returns it looks like this:

•           Years 1- 6 will lose 471 FTEs            
•           Years 7-8 will gain 241 FTEs             
•           Intermediate Schools will within the limits of the 2 FTE maximum loss when applied to the school will retain their specialist position additional staffing allowance. They enjoy the benefits of the increased Year 7-8 ratio which allpies to them as well as to full primary schools.
•           Years 9-10 will lose 748 FTEs           
•           Years 11-15 will gain 1,027 FTEs      

The real concern has to be the impact on Years 2-6 where in contributing primary schools where the more generous ratio at years 7 and 8 will not be available to even out the impact across the year levels. Secondary has gained.

There has been some very creative use of “class size” during this discussion and little emphasis on the goal of improved teacher quality. From what I can see the changes, and certainly with the compromise position which has probably pre-empted the work of any Working Group, there will be few resources released by the changes for teacher professional development. It is important to not lose sight of the reasons what all this fuss and pain was intended to achieve.

Stuart Middleton
EDTalkNZ
28 May 2012

I need help. Being a bear with a small brain, I have been struggling to understand some of the statements on television from school leaders about the impact of the changes to the student teacher ratio announced recently.

Last Friday evening for example we were told of a school, a primary school that would lose 5-6 teachers. Surely not I thought – this would be outrageous.

So what I did was a simple exercise in mathematics – I listed on a sheet of paper the 1 July roll return figures for 2011 for years 1- 15. Then I applied the old ratios and calculated the number of FTEs (full time equivalent positions) those figures would generate. For comparison I also calculated what the new ratios would generate.

On the basis simply of the number of FTE teaching positions generated, the change in ratios is neutral – in fact there is a gain of 11 FTEs across the entire school sector. But this is negligible given that the number of FTEs 33,170. A small shift in balance sees the secondary sector gain by about 240 FTEs at the expense of primary which loses about the same amount.

So the impacts that are being described to us must be in the calculations of all the additional positions generated by allowances – management, resource teachers, guidance, therapists and so on. These appear to account for a further 13,000 FTEs and I would imagine that the complexity of those calculations creates a somewhat tangled web of different approaches to allocating specific resources.

Has the change in ratios somehow produced a call for a leaner cadre of management in schools?

A reduction in the number of resource teachers feature strongly in the complaints from Principals and there are (or were) nearly 1,000 of these?

I was told the other day that intermediate schools were particularly hit by the changes in a negative way? On the surface the changes in ratios look favourable to them.

I do not doubt for one minute that the perceived impact of the changes on schools is real. School leaders would not go on television and say the things they have been saying if they were not. But if the actual changes to the ratios is neutral in terms of FTE teaching positions, then what is generating that impact?

Is there a discrepancy between the roll figures used to calculate staffing allowances and actual rolls? There shouldn’t be as school rolls have been very stable nationally for the past five years and have actually increased by a little over 4% in the past 10 years. Although national figures inevitably mask a decline in numbers in some areas and growth in others.

Is it that additional staffing outside the FTE calculations has been accumulating in schools where there has been a shift downwards in student numbers? A similar thing happened in the 1980s leading up to the changes in 1989 called Tomorrow’s Schools which saw some spectacular losses in staffing to some schools as new formulae bit in. Schools that had, over a period of time, “done well” in attracting additional staffing paid a heavy price.

Could it be that having staffing delivered in FTEs is limiting? Given the age profile of the teaching service it might, at the moment, be to the advantage of schools to have the salary funding delivered to it in some form of cashed up model?

Education does not have a good track record in embracing change and it would be a shame if the reactions to this change which does appear to simplify the whole business a little, is being challenged simply on the basis that it is change – we don’t like change.

So it is important for the real issues to be brought out in ways that people can understand. The dramatic and breathless condemnation of the changes as the end of learning in our lifetimes won’t cut it. Nor will spurious attempts to alarm parents that there will be extraordinary numbers of students in classrooms, there should not be. Nor will the community be impressed by silly calculations of the time available to teachers for interaction with each student as if that has ever been reflected in how excellent teachers work – “two minutes of talking with the teacher starting now”.

Teaching is predominantly a group activity and that is highlighted by the weight of evidence that the quality of the teacher rather than the precise size of the group is the key factor in the quality of learning.

Communities seek to support their schools and I think that they deserve better than the reactions to the changes in ratios that they have got. What are the real issues?

That’s why I need help. Explanations for the reactions do not seem to come out of a clinical examination of the numbers behind the changes.

I read this morning’s NZ Herald and a little more light is shed on the issue of Years 7 and 8 – it does seem that the additional staffing rather than the ratio is the issue – or does the ratio drive the additional staffing?  Check out the article at:  http://www.nzherald.co.nz/politics/news/article.cfm?c_id=280&objectid=10808913

Stuart Middleton
EDTalkNZ
24 May 2012

In amongst a budget that was pretty flat on excitement, there was some good news for education. Spending will bring some benefits to education some increase in the operating grants and the broadband roll-out will continue. Universities get another slurp into the PBRF research trough and there is a focus on science and engineering for increased EFTS funding.

Of course there is a downside – largely borne by the students who pay back loans a little more steeply, means testing remains and a new targeting of such assistance onto first degrees constitute something of a curate’s egg rather than a golden goose’s egg.

But the big three for me, no surprise here, is the increase in early childhood participation, the increase in the number of youth guarantee places and the NCEA Level 2 target.

To raise the ECE target to 98% from the current 94.7% might seem a modest increase but it is a huge ask in some communities. Access to early childhood education across different communities with different characteristics is discrepant. So if the goal is to be achieved do not expect a little bit for everyone, this will have to be well and truly targeted.

The increase in Youth Guarantee places is throwing good money after good money. The fees free places are providing a valuable opportunity for young people who otherwise might well lose momentum in the school setting, to enter a tertiary programme and, if indications from the first couple of years are a guide, succeed and move into qualifications that will lead them into real jobs.

Then there is the NCEA Target. It is stark in its expression! By 2016 85% of all 18 year olds will achieve NCEA Level 2 (or its equivalent). Now this is apparently not just 85% of those who tackle NCEA Level 2 but all 18 year olds. So the increase mentioned in the budget from 68% to 85% is the overall current result but there are challenges in this target that become more apparent when the total is deconstructed into its ethnic components.

The cohort that entered Year 11 in 2008 has performed as follows by the end of 2010 with regard to achieving NCEA Level 2.

•          NZ European               68%                
•          Asian                          74%    
•          Maori                          43%
•          Pacific                        58%

I actually wonder…

Now remember that probably 20% of 18 year olds have disengaged from school prior to age 16 years. Other students will have dropped out along the way through Year 11 and Year 12. So if this target is to be achieved equitably i.e. all 18 year old Maori, all 18 year old Pasifika etc then we will need to get our skates on. The group who will be the 18 year olds in 2016 are in Year 9 now. Help!

Earlier media attention was paid to the more controversial announcement in the budget that $512 million will be spent on improving teacher quality. We know of course that this is on the basis of savings that result from the squeezing of student / teacher ratio.

Something that intrigues me is a little calculation that I have done tells me that there is some good news for secondary schools in this. Based on national student number profiles (which means that there will be some differences for individual school to take account of their senior school profiles), the equalisation of the ratio across all the levels of the senior secondary school at the level of the current lowest (Year 13) rate will result in a 12% increase in teacher numbers nationally at the senior level.

Was this intended? I was surprised when I did this calculation because the Minister had said that schools would generally be affected by + 1 teachers. Am I wrong? If not then I am excited because increased teachers at the senior level should mean increased flexibility for schools.

If we are to hit that NCEA target in 2016 then that will be crucial.

Stuart Middleton
EDTalkNZ
18 May 2012

It is all a little surreal. I am up in Samoa for a couple of days finishing a task for the National University of Samoa and it happens again! The minute I leave New Zealand controversy breaks out.

This time the issue clusters around the announcement that teacher/pupil ratios are to rise a little. This is no surprise when just several weeks ago the Treasury put forward the argument that if we wished to really address teacher quality, one way of doing this would be to squeeze the ratios up a little, create uncommitted education funds and spend it on giving teachers the opportunity to develop new skills, to hone up the skills that they had and to generally contribute to that one thing we know really makes a difference to student achievement – teacher quality.

The announcement yesterday by Minister Parata did make an effort to emphasise that the money saved is not lost to education in the way that, say, the MFAT cuts money seems simply to be vacuumed up into the consolidated fund. In this respect education (and health) is being treated more favourably.

And this puts teacher and educators into a rather delicate corner because there is only a tenuous link between teacher/student ratios and class size. Or put more starkly, the increase in the ratios will not automatically mean that all classes will be larger. Schools will continue to make professional decisions about the optimal size for classes of different kinds. Reducing class sizes is clearly not a mechanism for school improvement.

I was an English teacher so I always got to teach classes that were as large as the school could manage. On the other hand some teachers in some subjects had rather fewer students. In primary schools this sort of manipulation is more difficult but perhaps high decile schools can justifiably have larger classes than low decile schools simply because the needs of the students are so dramatically different. This would be thwarted because of the way resources are allocated and there is little capability to transfer between schools. Imagine the fuss if differential ratios based on deciles was to be proposed.

The real difficulty is that the business model that school function with is not very functional. Having so much of the teacher resource tied up, and I mean tied up, in an inflexible staffing structure and delivered as FTEs leaves schools with little room to move. That is why the standardisation of the ratios between Years 2 to 8 and Years 11 to 13 seems to me to be an excellent move. The first signs of flexibility are creeping in.

Those who write the press releases for the Minister may have been a little careless in describing the money saved as “extra” – some of it seems to be new but some is really a reallocation. And how long now have we known that if we wish to achieve different results we will need to behave differently, we will have to use resources differently.

I think that the biggest risk in all this is that achievement might not go up. This would then create a rather traditional response from teacher organisations of “we told you so” when it might actually mean that the indicators are still heading south but more slowly. It is imperative now that we get into reporting progress in meaningful and honest ways and that means cohort reporting. What is happening to each group of students. That is the test.

So the unique student identifier has now become urgent and critical. I sometimes joke that an IRD Number should be tattooed, discretely of course but in a place able to be accessed without embarrassment, to help us achieve this but this idea has not gained ground. I believe that the privacy lobby is still arguing about the invasive nature of such identifiers. Meanwhile we pay a heavy price in education through simply not being able to produce robust statics on how we are going.

Then there is the impact of truancy on class size. If 29,000 students are on average away from school each day (these are official figures) then the impact on class size must have been significant. We will have to be vigilant that class sizes do not balloon as we get on top of truancy.

Also, if we tackle the NEETs issue with vigour and succeed there could be a further 20,000 students at school. Solving the issues of disengagement and educational failure is a sure way to increase the number of teachers in schools!

This is a vexed issue. Oh, I forgot there are also the teen parents (25,000 I was told). Of course there is some double counting in all these figures. A side issue is that a teen Mum only has an entitlement until age 18 years. This is something that is an abrogation of human rights and applies only to them and, seemingly, to First XV aspirants in Auckland schools!

The thing that will silence the argument about class size will be a clear improvement in achievement. That is the challenge and that is why we go teaching in the first place.

Stuart Middleton
EDTalkNZ
14 May 2012

Education has surely moved into centre stage in a way that is spectacularly ahead of any time that I can remember.

In setting the Better Public Service Goals for the performance of government and the public service generally, the Government settled on a set of goals that are making a clear statement – Education has to perform! And it has to deliver by 2016.

 Clustered under a set of five headings those goals are:

 Reducing long-term welfare dependency

1.     Reduce the number of people who have been on a working age benefit for more than 12 months

Supporting vulnerable children

2.     Increase participation in early childhood education.

3.     Increase infant immunisation rates and reduce the incidence of rheumatic fever

4.     Reduce the number of assaults on children.

Boosting skills and employment

5.     Increase the proportion of 18 year olds with NCEA level 2 or equivalent qualification.

6.     Increase the proportion of 25-34 year olds with advanced trade qualifications, diplomas and degrees (at level 4 or above).

Reducing crime

7. Reduce the rates of total crime, violent crime and youth crime.

8. Reduce reoffending.

Improving interaction with government

9. New Zealand businesses have a one-stop online shop for all government advice and support they need to run and grow their business.

10. New Zealanders can complete their transactions with the Government easily in a digital environment.

On first glance it might appear that No.5 and No.6 are the key education goals. NCEA Level 2 for 85% of all 18 year olds seems certainlynow to have been accepted as the goal in terms of school leaving qualifications. The target for trades qualifications is appropriate even if expressed in rather softer terms. Both are tough goals and I will come back to these at some later date!

But it is the other eight goals that excite me today.

Getting people off benefits can only be achieved by training, retraining and education. There are jobs out there but there is a dearth of people especially among the benefit dependent with the skills to get them. Education and especially trades education and training will be central to Goal No.1. Education that succeeds will create more jobs as the increased supply of a skilled labour force will drive and increase demand.

Early childhood education is the very foundation for success in education generally and subsequently in life. This is recognised in Goal No.2 while Goals No.3 and 4 would be more likely to be attained in a well-educated and knowledgeable community. Perhaps the role of education is more peripheral here but it is among the poorly educated and ill-trained and those without skills that these issues are at their greatest.

We know the statistics for crime, youth justice, incarceration and general evil doing track closely the statistics of educational failure and disengagement. Goals 7 and 8, while not a direct consequence of what we do in education are certainly able to be impacted on them positively by what we could do in education. It is the best investment if we are serious about crime and offending.

That leaves No.9 and No.10 which at first glance seem to be the least connected. But business performance is greatly helped by a well-educated workforce and management skills are enhanced by education. Capability to deal with the mechanics of business development and growth from a government point of view is susceptible to an improvement through education.

So overall the 10 goals are a very strong statement about education. They are also a very tough ask.

But if we improve levels of educational success and engagement, if we make inroads into the NEETs in New Zealand, if we can knock truancy on the head, if we can get all students to a secure point for moving on from school and then get them successfully through the next qualifications – then and only then will the Better Public Service goals be met.

Education has moved to centre stage, the lights have gone up and the show has begun!

Are we up to it?

Stuart Middleton
EdTalkNZ
10 May 2012

Our government is to introduce a programme whereby young mothers, teen mums, can get long lasting but reversible contraception at no cost.

This prophylactic response is provoking some discussion – is it one state intervention too far? One commentator has termed it a “eugenic meddling”, others have been shocked, horrified and indignant while the moderate response has been to cast doubt on its value and effectiveness in bringing about the social and economic benefits that the policy claims.

I suspect that the red-neck response is out there but is remarkably quiet on this one.

Anything that removes complication from the lives of young parents could be a good thing if this is backed up with real opportunity to use the space created in a less complicated life positively. And that means some connection between such an initiative and education and training.

Teen parents number about 25,000 in New Zealand and I would guess that most of them are struggling young women. Moving on and up is critical if they are to face a future that enables them to actually give their young children any sort of chance. Many of these parents are both on their own and, I guess, alone.

If they can be helped with free contraception why cannot they be helped with free education and training that would be of great benefit to both the parent and the child?  Spending money on getting people up to speed with a qualification that results in a job is the soundest expenditure because it results in a return on investment through taxes and the savings from money not spent on welfare interventions,  in court and penal systems, increased healthcare costs and housing issues.

Education and training is to ignorance and helplessness what contraception is to unplanned pregnancies.

Reluctance among governments to accept that the cost of provision for education is the cheap option compared to doing nothing and seeing the cycles of educational failure repeat themselves in families defies understanding. Breaking the cycle is the only way that long term economic benefits accrue. Governments accept all kinds of spurious economic impacts related to major sporting events, new sports stadiums and other glamorous activities. What about accepting that the economic impact of expenditure on the education of those who are likely to be unemployable brings the greatest returns of any expenditure? And the gains from such expenditure are not just to the individual, we all benefit.

That is why a programme to get “First Generation Students”, “First in Family” (call them what you like) into through and out of education and training deserves both closer attention and action. We know that when that “First Generation Student” gets through a family is transformed and new educational aspirations infuse families both vertically and horizontally. It is like a cluster bomb of opportunity exploding in the lives of a family and they are changed as a group forever.

I wonder how many of these young mothers who they want to stop having babies are “first in family” when it comes to education and training.

In addition to a focus on the young and the fertile, we could well add a focus on those young people who can act as family circuit breakers with regard to education and training. I already hear rumblings about how difficult it would be to decide what a family is, who is really the first-in-family to take the pathway to qualifications and so on. It might be but sensible people can make sensible decisions about this.

Devising a set of selection criteria for this First in Family Guarantee, a name that would reflects a connection to the Youth Guarantee policy, would be relatively simple. “Has anyone in your immediate family got a post secondary qualification? No? Well you are the “first-in family” so here is a hand up.” That doesn’t seem too hard.

You see spending money in ways that get a return is simpler than continuing to throw money at students through loans and allowances and wondering not only if you are getting a return but also whether you will get the money back. The simple schemes such as that proposed here for first-in-family look elegant by contrast.

A year ago it was reported that 50 student borrowers in New Zealand were responsible for debt of $11 million – the economic impact report on that would be interesting! Student loans in New Zealand now make up a total debt in excess of $11 billion ($NZ)! Don’t tell me that we do not have the money for sound interventions.

If the government can spend $1million on the contraceptive scheme, I challenge them to spend $1 million on a First-in-Family scheme. Both sums of money would work on fertile land; I know which one I would back for a return.

Stuart Middleton
EDTalkNZ
7 May 2012

Something of a discussion almost started last week when University of Auckland Vice-Chancellor Stuart McCutcheon published an opinion piece in the NZ Herald arguing that if New Zealand wished to have world class universities it had better spend more on them.

He pointed out that the ranking of New Zealand universities in “Top World Class University” lists was steadily falling. Of course there are a number of these lists so no doubt we like to refer to lists on which NZ does well but currently they all make for challenging reading. In the highly regarded Shanghai Jiao Tong 2011 Academic ranking of World Universities, New Zealand had no universities in the top 100, indeed the top 200. Australia had four in the top 100.

The top ten universities in the world were: Harvard (No.1 for many years), MIT (Massachusetts not Otara!), UC Berkeley, University of Cambridge, Caltech, Princeton, Columbia (NY), Chicago and Oxford.

In wondering about solutions, VC McCutcheon noted that having fewer students at university would be one way provided the same amount of money was available. But I have another solution.

In the late 1990s Lord Dearing posited that there was a quantum of population required to generate a world class university – I think it was about 4 million people. On that basis New Zealand could perhaps have reasonable aspirations to have one world class university, Australia five, the UK fifteen and so on. That seems about right.

So if New Zealand is to have one world class university it can only be the University of Auckland on current ratings. So a decision should be made that the funding models and emphases of that university will be driven towards achieving Top 100 status.

Wait a minute, there is another factor to be taken into account here – the size of the university. If you look at a selection of the world’s best universities the size is surprisingly small: Stanford University – 15,500; Harvard University – 21,000; MIT (US) – 10,894; Oxford University – 21,000 and University of Cambridge – 18,000.

University of Auckland has 40,000 students. Can it hope to compete?

Another factor. If you look at the small set of top world-class universities,  the ratio of undergraduate students to postgraduate students is as follows:

Stanford University – undergraduate students 44%: postgraduate students 56%; Harvard University – 31%:69%; MIT (US) – 40%:60%; Oxford University – 55%:44%; University of Cambridge- 66%:33%. So the USA universities are markedly weighted towards postgraduate students.

The University of Auckland has 75% undergraduate and 25% postgraduate students. Can it hope to compete?

Interestingly, the other New Zealand ratios in this regard are: Massey 76%:24%; Canterbury 86%:14%; Waikato 84%:16%; Victoria 76%:24% and Otago 78%:22%. So three New Zealand universities have very similar ratios. [1]

Here is my plan for New Zealand to get into the Top 100 university list and stay there.

1.  The University of Auckland should be designated our university for which this is a goal – New Zealand’s World Class University

The justification for this is its current superior world ranking when compared to the rest and its situation. It is in New Zealand’s largest city which has a wide range of tertiary provision therefore freeing up the University of Auckland to have a special goal – Massey, AUT, the two Polytechnics (Unitec and MIT(NZ)) and Te Wananga o Aotearoa can provide excellent tertiary education for Auckland to complement the narrower and targeted approach the University of Auckland would be taking.

In light of the above information about Top 100 universities, the University of Auckland must also consider two further actions:

2. reducing its size by 50%:

3. shifting the balance of undergraduate to postgraduate students to something closer to that of the top USA universities.

Were this solution accepted, there would be no need for reduced student numbers in tertiary programmes, simply a redistribution of numbers across Auckland providers. A smaller University of Auckland focussed on research and predominantly concerned with postgraduate university education would quickly return to the Top 100 list at no additional cost to the government. To achieve this the University of Auckland might have to be funded on a different basis to the rest, so be it.

Yes, this is elitist, so is Valerie Adams winning the shot putt and our rowers winning races and the high regard in which so many aspects of New Zealanders achievements are held. Well, I think we just have to accept that, get over it and move on. To think that we can have more than one world class university is sheer stupidity and it is even quite insane to hold back our best chance on some spurious egalitarian argument. 

[1]Figures for the undergraduate / postgraduate split at AUT were presented a little differently with 84% of students working at Bachelor level or above.

Stuart Middleton
EdTalkNZ
19 April 2012

Shanghai, China

The last stage of the Auckland Mayor’s trade delegation to China is is in Shanghai this week. Here are some verbal snapshots from the album:

•          To get from Ningbo to Shanghai by road used to take 5-6 hours by road – now you can do it in three hours because they have built a 35 kilometre bridge across the sea of the Yangtze Delta. Why do we struggle with the issue of getting across the narrow Auckland Harbour?
•          In Qing Dao we crossed the extensive harbour by going under it through a 7 kilometre tunnel. Again, why do we struggle……
•         Each of the five cities the delegation has visited is building or extending an underground subway system. This is being achieved with seemingly little disruption to traffic (which it must be admitted is a little chaotic at its best). 
•          We drive past many schools and frequently see what appears to be the entire school doing physical exercises. This seems to be greatly valued. So too is walking to school. If children can walk to school in the cities of China why is it so impossible for children in New Zealand? 
•          It appears that many schools provide school lunches. In one of the provinces this week a group of students became ill after eating the lunches at a school. Both principals of the school were, it was reported, “immediately dismissed”. That is one form of accountability. 
•          My quest to understand the China approach to or system for trades training remains difficult largely because it is becoming apparent to me that there isn’t one. I have variously been informed that: 

o   if you wish to learn a trade you simply find someone who performs that trade and try and get employed by them;

o   at the age of about fifteen you can go into a vocationally oriented senior middle school and learn work skills – I have yet to see  inside one of these institutions;

o   there is no qualifications framework for trades in China therefore it is very unclear just when someone becomes “qualified”;

Despite all this, the cars appear to continue to work, the buildings often display incredible quality of finishing, infrastructure is built at an amazing rate often to spectacular designs, chefs prepare meals, telephones work, fast broadband is widely available in the cities and so on. This area is for me a Chinese puzzle. 

•          China reports a growing concern at the unemployment rates among degree graduates. In light of the previous snapshot, you have to wonder if direction is a little askew. Then you remember that the opening up of China sees increasing influence of western patterns and systems and the imbalance between degree qualifications and technician / technical qualifications features in each of the western systems that China is increasingly influenced by. Could it be that the West is exporting its educational mistakes to the East? 
•          The importance of major events has been rammed home through regular mention of the importance of the Olympic Games to Beijing, the Asia Games to Guangzhou, the World Expo to Shanghai and so on. The impact of these events seems not to be based on the sort of spurious economic impact stuff that we are asked to accept but rather on the improvement to infrastructure and facilities that is the legacy. 

But as I head towards home I am reflecting on the advantages of a lack of scale – we do have special opportunities in New Zealand to get it right because we are so small. We need to grasp this as an opportunity and not use it as an excuse for inaction or as a justification.

Stuart Middleton
EDTalkNZ
13 April 2012

For some time I have listed the level of truancy in New Zealand schools as being 30,000 students truanting every day. I knew this to be true even though such a revelation would be often greeted with incredulity. But it is official now!

The weekend paper screams its headline “WAGGING SCHOOL THE DAILY DEAL FOR 29,000”.  This is an official 10% of the New Zealand school roll. Or as the paper put it, the equivalent of the population of Blenheim fails to go to school each day!

How did we achieve the fall of 1,000 between the older figure of 30k and the latest result, 29k? Well it appears that $4million dollars was paid out over the past two years to tackle the issue and the figures have dropped by about one thousand, a 3% reduction for $4 million! Or put another way – for $4,000 we can get one truant back to school. So if we put up another $116 million, could we lick the problem of truancy? I think not. 

I wonder if it occurs to anyone that truancy is but a symptom of an education system that is simply not working. To think that the answers lie in the schools is about as silly and thinking that the answer to alcoholism will be found inside a pub.

Schools as they are currently constituted have never catered for a diverse population over a thirteen year time span. The comprehensive nature of the schools as they have developed compounds the issue, keeping students in school long past the point at which they are learning exacerbates it and throwing money and trying to get “truants” back into the school is, without significant changes, simply wasted.

The reasons given by students for being truant as reported make for grim reading. They were “hungover” and “stoned”. School was “boring” “dumb” and they were “bored”. This is so depressing but only slightly less so than the description of this group by a school leader – “Children are staying home to look after siblings or do housework and other activities in the home.”  Baking scones and doing needlework as well perhaps.

Get real!  We have a growing crisis in New Zealand with our young people. We mope around grizzling about youth unemployment when the fact is that we have a bigger problem with unemployable youth. The group that truants is the group that become NEETs, the group that feeds the youth justice system, the group that forever and a day will be a drag on the wealth of the community and the country and its citizens.

I cannot accept the Minister’s seeing the solution as being predominantly in the community. True, the community has to play its part, generally the 90% of students who do not truant reflect that the community is doing just that and I meet parents of some of the other 10% who wish for nothing more than that their sons and daughters would want to go to school.

The truth in these kinds of issues is always in the middle. The Minister notes in her quoted statement that Principals and boards are responsible for offering an “engaging programme.”

It is no good battling truancy, being able to monitor attendance electronically or prosecuting parents unless we address the issue of what constitutes an “engaging programme”. This should not be difficult and here goes:

An engaging programme is one in which:

•   students are successfully taught the basic skills of literacy, numeracy and digital schools
•   students are taught the skills of employment, develop social skills, demonstrate work skills and relate easily to others in diverse settings
•   students have a sense of purpose in their education where they see connection between what they are doing and where they are headed (students who see no purpose see no point in being at school); 
•    where schools demonstrate an interest in all students and give them a vested interest in engaging with the school programme.

There is too much failure in primary schools and too great a lack of purpose in secondary schools for our education system to be free of truancy. How long will we continue to be spectators of the trends without heeding what they are telling us?

Stuart Middleton
EdTalkNZ
4 April 2012

I cannot understand why there seems to be reluctance and even resistance to the idea that a critical outcome of education is to get a job. Note that I have said “a critical outcome” and made no claim that it is the only outcome. But I must say that without the capability of getting a job after 10, 12, and 13 perhaps even 20 years of formal education all other outcomes are made to look rather meaningless and trite.

When I went to school, (yes, this usually breaks out a chorus of simulated violin playing, shouts of “he’ll tell us about walking to school barefoot in the snow into the teeth of a raging gale next” and many other kinds of loving derision) we knew why – it was to get a job. Indeed at the age of 12, I was enrolled in a technical secondary school to become a carpenter. The course of my life was fixed on that job or so I thought.

It is a whole other story, intervention by well-meaning educators who classed me as “academic” and despatched me into 10 years of academic learning, the most perplexing years of my life when I most flirted with failure. The removal of the goal of a clear job for a future shaped rather amorphously which only later crystallised into teaching as a job, certainly made  my pathway rockier than it needed to be.

Take the espoused goal of creating a lifelong learner. I’ll show you a lifelong learner when a person has demonstrated that they are – it is not a soft prediction that one makes. Many seemingly self-educated people are not lifelong learners. To say “I am a lifelong learner” can only be the conclusion drawn after looking back on at least a chunk of a life and being able to document clearly the evidence.

You see, what we need from educational experiences is the capability to do whatever is asked of us next. That is why I am frustrated by the unwillingness of education systems to accept that the key purpose of each stage of formal education is to prepare students for the next stage of their lives – education, eventually being a responsible adult, and, yes, finally getting a job.

Then there is the nonsense that we are in the business of preparing people to have “at least seven careers” as I read somewhere last week. This is baloney. Rare people have two careers perhaps but most, if they have a career at all, have one. “Career” is a qualitative judgment about a continuous quality of achievement in an area of employment. It might mean that a person has different jobs; indeed it is probably essential that they do, but they are changes and growth within a field not a succession of wild swings between “careers”.

Education would do well to set as a key goal, the aim of getting each and every student into a job.

Yes there are issues of unemployment but remember that the creation of unemployment is the outcome of a deliberate ideological stance about how economies best run. We could have full employment if we so wished and were prepared to pay for it and perhaps the western world will return to that one day. Who knows?. Or could we return?

Alongside the issue of youth unemployment we have another mammoth in the house, the unemployable youth. The skills of employment are not hard to define and one list is about as good as another.

Reliability, punctuality, pride in work, ability to work unsupervised, knowing what productivity means, ability to learn, enthusiasm all occur to me. A better, much more worthy, can be seen at http://www.quintcareers.com/job_skills_values.html . These should be a given if an education system is half good. But too often students have simply not acquired them. This is not simply the fault of the system or those who teach but we should ask questions about why this simple catalogue of dispositions and skills evades so many learners.

And the answer is clearly, because they cannot see a connection between what they are doing and the life of working in a job or jobs. Unemployment is a scourge of that we can be certain. The wonderful and gruesome and dispiriting TV series, Boys from the Blackstuff, a British television drama series from the early 1980s sticks in the mind for its main character  Yosser Hughes who was somewhat demented by not having a job and the devastation that brought into his life. He had a couple of catchphrases, “Gizza’ job!” and “I can do that!” which summed up the continual torture of unemployment.

Of course the 1980s a time of serious unemployment among adults who lost their jobs. Now the issues seems increasingly to be among the young who have never had jobs.

Can education hold its head up high and say that we are doing our best? Or even that we are addressing the issue?

Stuart Middleton
EdTalkNZ
22 March 2012

It looks as if the stars are coming into alignment in education. First there was the Prime Minister with clear statements about education and training and some inarguable goals followed by a minor distraction from what has turned out to be a falling star, Nick Smith.

Now we have the Secretary to the Treasury, Gabriel Makhlouf, in a speech on the kind of economic leadership needed in these somewhat unusual times, providing an evidence-based commentary on the importance of education and the role of schools in lifting the levels of New Zealand’s skills.

The importance of education as is made clear.  “A skilled workforce is crucial to raising growth and productivity… better skills make us more adaptable… and education is like a factory for opportunity and ideas.”  Acknowledging that improvement in education is a necessity right across all forms and levels, like so many other commentators he focuses on the school system.

The response to the Treasury Briefing to the Incoming Minister noted that class size was a mechanism for freeing resources that might be used for improvement and Mahlouf rightly brings some perspective into this – the issue is not the number of students in a classroom, it is the achievement that comes out of 13 years, 38-40 weeks each year, 25 hours each week, of schooling that is the real issue.

This is not the first time that Treasury briefing papers to an incoming Minister have been the starting point for education reform. In 1987 a very substantial briefing led to the reforms of educational administration and wide-reaching tertiary reforms. Is this the trigger for another period of reform?

He does pick his targets carefully. Despite the use of a rather flattering and kind measure for achievement of NCEA Level 2 (a global figure of 70% rather than the much more challenging Maori and Pasifika outcomes) he questions whether three out of ten students are “simply too hard to teach or are incapable of learning basic skills” and concludes that “the system is failing some students.”

I recall a Treasury official walking into my office some years ago and getting straight to the point by asking me to tell him who in the country is accountable for educational failure.  I replied, without hesitation, “no-one!”. And this has remained the case.

The speech develops a theme around two points. First, the critical factor in student performance is the quality of teaching and, secondly, education like all of us will have to seek improvement within the existing resources that it has.

Jacques Barzun many years ago asserted that it was not the competence of teachers that was the problem; rather it was the fact that too many good teachers were doing the wrong thing. That probably still applies and the remedy is clear – find out what is happening in classrooms, establish what curriculum and practices would affect improvements in student outcomes and put into place professional development that addresses it. This raises issues that we shy away from in education.

We find it hard to accept that there are differences between teachers that result in variable student outcomes. We find it hard to accept assessment of teacher performance that would guide us towards helping those teachers who are off the mark in leading students to positive outcomes. We find it hard to believe that the curriculum needs scrutiny and continue to treat it as if it were a holy document when clearly it is playing a part in driving us towards those variable outcomes.

And we love discussions that distract rather than enlighten. The reactions to Treasury’s earlier suggestion that class size might be a mechanism for generating the resources to achieve the remediation of the performance of the schooling system unleashed the tired old responses. Every Mum in the country knows that to make ends meet she must either find extra money or shift what money she has around when a new household expense comes around. When one option is not open, the other is the only way. Mum has to decide priorities.

Makhlouf tidily sums up just such a priority: “Class size matters but the quality of teaching matters more.”  

I hope that this speech and the material accompanying it is a starting point on an urgent and serious discussion of the central issue in economic recovery, growth and development, the level of education outcomes for young New Zealanders.

Stuart Middleton
EDTalkNZ
20 March 2012

The Entree:    What’s not local about education and training?

Local Government Minister Nick Smith is wide of the mark when he calls for local government to get “out of education” and uses the example of “a council that sets a target of Level 2 NCEA”.  He goes on to say that local government has no business doing central government business. This is referring to the Auckland Council’s clear target for education and skills in the region.

He is right to say that local government should not be doing central government business but misses the point that local government has a role to play in seeing that central government does its business. There is no issue with the Level 2 NCEA goal – last Thursday Prime Minister John Key clearly set exactly the same goal for the government and his Ministers (see below).

The role of local government with regard to this target is to advocate for central government to deliver on it. It might also have a role in facilitating collaboration and innovation across the region to support the goal. Such a goal, and this is clear to the Government and certainly the Prime Minister if not to Minister Smith, is at the heart of economic growth and development. When the Auckland Council and the central Government sit down to talk about such matters, it is exciting to think that they will share the same goal.

One party (central government) will be held to account in that discussion for delivering on it while the other party (local government) will be showing how it contributes to a region that is similarly committed to it and which contributes in appropriate ways to it. No local government has an appetite to do the government’s work!  But if unitary councils are to be taken seriously, central government has to see that its work is contributing to regional aspirations.

Minister Smith needs to get up to speed on education and training, its performance and its role.

The Main Course:  Whose will be done?  Education must respond.

The recent speech from Prime Minister John Key outlined some directions that will impact on education and training.

Education will have a key role to play in the reduction of numbers of people on a “working age benefit”. Many of this target group will through in some cases no fault of their own – life dealt a pretty rough hand – require additional training and education before they are able to work. The skills of employment may have moved beyond the level of competence that they were able to reach in previous employment or in their education (IT springs to mind).

This raises the issue of transition – just how are people assisted to move from benefit dependency to self-reliance in employment as a wage earner. It is not black and white, one minute you have a benefit, the next you are in sound employment. And certainly an interview in a WINZ office will not achieve it. Education institutions should get their thinking caps on.

It is interesting to see access to ECE placed into a “supporting vulnerable children” set of responses – increasing access, increased immunisation and reducing the rate of assaults on children. I hope the goal is to reduce assaults on children down to zero!  Again education is a key.

And it is also an explicit player in the goal to boost skills and employment. NCEA Level 2 (or an equivalent) will be a key marker of a platform from which 18 year olds can launch the pathways into the world of further education and training and of employment. This is sensible. It sets a clear target that should be attainable by all students without requiring them to continue along a track headed towards university when this is not the goal. But it is also a big ask for us to achieve!

Add to this the development of “Vocational Pathways” within NCEA and the promise they have to bring integrity and cohesion to the programmes of many students not heading towards university. We are starting to see shape in the senior levels of schooling with these proposals.

It therefore makes sense for the performance of 19-24 year olds to get some attention. The goal has been placed at an excellent level – advanced trade qualifications, diplomas and degrees (at Level 4 and above). 

Evidence supports this goal as one which will lead to employment, to a family sustaining income and to allowing a person to make a positive contribution to society. For it is a fact that a person qualified to at least this level is highly unlikely to be engaged in the dark arts of crime. It all ties together.

Get a well educated and knowledgeable community and you will get one which is less dependent of benefits, less likely to bash children, be more assertive about getting education for their children and looking after them and, of course, will be both employable and employed. So the challenge is there to all of us in the education community and we simply have to be up to it. With the clear connections now being made between education and social and economic development clearly and in measurable terms, we will have nowhere to go if we don’t perform on such measures. Certainly we cannot sit back and blame it on the government – this government or any government for that matter.

Finally, there must be at least a touch of interest in the creation of the “Super-Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment.” Of course there are cost-cuttings and efficiency considerations in this expression of the latest attempt to clean up the Public Service. But there might also be quite a lot of good sense in seeing new connections and taking a multidisciplinary approach to public policy and oversight. The inclusion of Building and Housing also seems more like a continuation of a search for a safer pair of hands. But to group economic development, labour, science and innovation seems to create a potential for increased impact and progress in those areas.

Will the spotlight turn next to education? Bringing together the Ministry of Education, the Tertiary Education Commission, the Education Review Office and the New Zealand Qualifications Authority would at least be an interesting discussion and might well have legs. Perhaps the Careers Service could also be included. Have I left anyone out?

We talk a lot about connection and transition in education and how the lack of smooth transitions gets in the way of education success for too many and yet we all work within an education system that is built around a lack of connection.

Connections, transitions, lifting education access and outcomes – a lively setting for education is emerging.

Stuart Middleton
EdTalkNZ
12 March 2012

I got into a discussion about youth unemployment recently with an interesting group of people. There was strong agreement that there was an issue, if not a crisis.

I suggested that we not only had the issue of youth unemployment but also an issue of unemployable youth. We are creating the confluence of two weather systems that will create a storm of Wahine proportions as the deep depression of youth unemployment meets the deep depression of unemployable youth to create dangerous waters and cyclonic winds that will in all probability rip the social fabric.

The issue of youth unemployment in New Zealand is exacerbated by a number of factors.

First, New Zealand has one of the highest proportions of youth workers aged 15-24 years in the labour force. Consequently when things turn tough we see a higher proportion of youth affected negatively. Nearly half of New Zealand’s unemployed is made up of this younger age group. Furthermore this youthful group splits into two clearly distinct groups – one is skilled and qualified while the other is disengaged from education and training and subsequently has little prospect of work.  No amount of improvement in the economy will address the issue of this latter group.

These two groups split along ethnic lines and hence the connection between this first exacerbating factor and the second. With the second group having such large representation of Maori and Pasifika youth the performance of these groups in the education system is critical.

NZQA has recently published the results of the 2008 Year 11 cohort in the NCEA as this group went through the senior school what was their level of achievement. This is a much more honest reporting than any that is based on the percentage of Year levels achieving since the cumulative percentages based on percentages inflates the result considerably. Now remember that this is the Year 11.

Remember too that this cohort is the group that actually made it to Year 11. So the cohort will be around 80% of the group that set out in education. And where numbers of Maori and Pacific students are higher the cohort will reflect an even smaller percentage of the actual cohort.

So with that in mind, this is the picture of real achievement:

In Year 11 students achieve in NCEA as follows:

NCEA L1 achieved…          … in Year 11          …In Year 12           ….in Year 13                         

NZ European                         72%                       81%                        81%                

Asian                                       70%                       80%                        81%                

Maori                                        44%                       57%                        59%                

Pacific                                      44%                       68%                        71%                

NCEA Level 2 has emerged as the level which all students should achieve prior to leaving school so as to have a good basis for further education and training. So what are the actual figures for the achievement of Level 2 by the end of Year 13?

NZ European                           68%                                                                                

Asian                                       74%               

Maori                                         43%

Pacific                                       58%

So even this basic measure of completing secondary school with the requisite achievement for further success is a cause for concern and those figures has in it a very clear message about youth unemployment.

Urgency must be brought to relating more closely the curriculum of the senior secondary school to the requirements of employment and to pathways that lead seamlessly from school into jobs and into further education and training. Each sector has a contribution to make to this. We will never solve all of the issues of youth unemployment if we cannot plug the flow of unemployable into the 15-24 year old group.

“Unemployment” should be a category for those who can work and want to work but who cannot get a job. Using it as a bucket category which in addition includes those who are unemployable and those who are in some form of social welfare trap, or both, leads to fuzzy responses that miss their mark.

What we do know is that the ethnicity of the demographics tells us that addressing this is urgent. A storm is brewing and like El Nino and La Nina they will not go away.

Stuart Middleton
EDTalkNZ
8 March 2012

The worrying statistics keep flowing. In the past week we are told that….

• 50% of Pacific Island young people in New Zealand between the age of 16 and 24 years are unemployed;
• in the UK there are now over 1 million between the ages of 19 and 24 who are unemployed.

You have to be worried and it underlines that our education systems need some changes.

It is absurd to write of education systems as not working – they plainly are for a large number of people, they always have worked for that number of people and the top of the UK, USA, Australia and New Zealand systems are right up with the best.

But these countries do not really have one education system they each have two.

One of these systems wins Nobel Prizes, invents things, pushes technology to new places, makes brilliant advances in medical sciences and makes a global contribution to knowledge.

The other systems in each of these countries stutter along with groups of students that they find difficult to engage and even harder to teach.

And the demographics are working against us. The groups with which we have traditionally gained good outcomes is getting proportionately smaller while those that we struggle with are growing quickly. The traditional supply of the traditionally successful students will one day simply not be there in quantities that can sustain the activity we want, especially in higher education.

Partly our issues are exacerbated by our unwillingness to use measures that are clear and tough. Often I read that a “Decile 2 school is performing at the level of a Decile 4 school.” This is nonsense. Why benchmark performance against Decile 4. If we were serious we would benchmark the Decile 2 school against a Decile 10 school and set out to address the gaps. Either that or we throw our hands in the air and give up on equitable outcomes.

Actually decile ratings don’t mean all that much in the middle range. There is a homogeneity about schools with low ratings and school with high ratings. Those in the middle are an amalgam often of New Zealand’s mix. A decile rating is an average so mix some factors that contribute to low ratings with those that contribute to high ratings and you have a middle rating.

There is only a small set of measures that will get us cracking and the metrics for them are simple.

Participation – get them in. Universal means universal so there must be 100% access to and participation in early childhood education, primary and secondary schooling with no loss in the cohort. If 100 students are born, 100 should be in ECE and 100 should come out of secondary school. In fact with immigration the numbers should probably increase. Access and disengagement are the issues to tackle here.

Retention – keeping them there. This is the big issue. Students simply have to be engaged if they are to succeed. Schools are no use to an absent student. So really putting place tracking and monitoring, programmes that engage all students, doing something meaningful about truancy, proving additional support to families and to school to deal with the intrusive non-educational issues. An education system that fails to retain students isn’t simply doing a poor job, it’s not getting a chance to do any job with those students.

Success – getting them through. This means meaningful qualifications. The emergence of NCEA Level 2 and the school leaving qualification is a good development. I came across a view recently that wondered if NCEA Level 2 was “too hard to ask!”.   Well, heaven preserve us. NCEA Level 2 will not put a man on the moon nor will it win a Nobel. But it is a critical staging post on the way to somewhere positive and rewarding. So the issues here are multiple pathways (different students need different tracks to success), accountability measures (that make the gaining of meaningful qualifications not only a measure of success for the student but also the mark of success for the institution) and a greater focus on real qualifications.

These three simple measures require complex responses. Otherwise the statistics of the unemployed will need to be differentiated – the unemployed and the unemployable.

 
Stuart Middleton
EdTalkNZ
5 March 2012

Nero will around soon to hand out the violins.

Once again as the rugby season approaches the secondary school system is made to look silly by the annual argument about eligibility to play school sport for this school or that school. The issue is this: some secondary school principals cannot trust each other. They believe that their colleagues (but without exception never themselves) will stoop to illegal means to gain advantage by poaching athletes with skill from other schools.

It really is the poacher up against the gamekeeper and the poacher turned gamekeeper all rolled into one.

They wish to have a stand-down period which will expunge any naughty thoughts from the minds of young people who want to play sport for their new school and serve to teach the new Principal a jolly good lesson.

Set to music by Gilbert and Sullivan it would be a hit – intrigue, pomposity, victims, heroes and some damned fine choruses.

I felt some sympathy for the young lad who, having shifted school (as is his right), is now not allowed to play for six weeks (which is a breech of his rights). He wonders why a drunken All Black responsible for a certain amount of mayhem gets four weeks and he gets six weeks for doing nothing. He might well wonder why a cricketer who has repeated  misdemeanours gets one week and he gets 6!

A cricket coach tells me of being accosted by a Principal from the school they were playing against who declaimed that a certain young man should not be playing. He left with the assertion that “You are in trouble!” – later he was proved to be wrong.

I cannot understand for one minute why Principals who expect all their students to play by the rules seem unable to expect that they and their colleagues will as well.

If a young boy or a young girl sees opportunities at another school and is able to make the change, who should stand in their way? Such changes do not always pay off and there are quite a few instances of young men and women who don’t make the grade. Of course the school to which they are going must be able to show that they have behaved ethically and professionally. Principals have, since principal groups first existed, exercised too much of their time at meetings coming to an agreement about how “school transfers” are to be managed. (If FIFA can get it right, a group of principals working at a school level ought to be able to.)

Having agreed they should simply let themselves and their colleagues be guided by those rules. Schools derive leadership from both Principals and Principles and when there are Principals with Principles the results can be magic.

All principals know how tedious it is to have to sort out a “she said/he said”,  “no I didn’t / yes you did” sort of argument between Year 10 students. Well, that is the same tedium that the public sees in the arguments school leaders have about school sport and eligibility.

Those who set school sport on the greasy slippery slope of inducements for playing school sport for schools might have stopped and given it a little more thought at the time. Come to think of it, that is exactly the advice they often give to silly students who end up in their office after some incident or another.

And there are surely real issues in education that need their attention.

Stuart Middleton
EDTalkNZ
1 March 2012

It’s official – going to meetings can harm you.

Researchers at Virginia Tech in the US have confirmed through a research study that the performance of people in IQ tests after having attended meetings is clearly lower than if they do not attend. The effect is greater on women than on men.

Read Montague, the leader of the research team, is reported as saying that “You may joke about how committee meetings make you feel brain-dead but our findings suggest that you may act brain-dead as well.”

This seems to me to be harsh finding and the reasons, if there is truth in the findings, might be the result of both the matter of the meetings and the way they are conducted. Too often we all sit in meetings at which the matters under discussion could have been addressed by a phone call, or an email, or even a newsletter. When I said to a colleague recently that “it is as if the phone and email have not yet been invented…..” they replied with a sigh, “… and all the pigeons have bird ‘flu!”

Meetings that are animated notice boards are not really meetings at all. Meetings are not a very efficient way of giving information. Distribution is disrupted by the attendance at meetings, the key messages or meanings of the matter can be distorted not once but many times as emphases change in the re-telling, parts are embellished or left out. The only certain means of communication is written and with the luxury of the varied means of distribution we have these days, getting material out to everybody is relatively easy.

Then there are the Laptop Lapses when a presentation is in order. “Who knows how to log in to the computer?” I once was in the middle of a presentation when the laptop, provided by the organisation, went ta ta’s to update some programme or other and then without permission closed down and restarted. The technical people were off having coffee and no-one knew the logins. It was something of a shambles saved only by a long string of anecdotes some of which had passing relevance to the topic.

Anecdotes are usually a sign of desperation in a meeting. You can sense them coming on. The topic is struggling and then it happens, the great plunge into the darkness of the anecdote. A good thing to come out of this might be that the person has participated but usually there is a sense of “So what?” when the little tale concludes.

It can also cause discussion drift – the agenda is put to one side and another issue takes over which leads to another issue which …..and so on. Only stern chairing of the meeting can stop this occurring.

In education we sometimes indulge in meetings that address issues as relevant as the alignment of the teacups while not addressing the very small number of issues that are a real reason for meeting. Who participates in education? What are retention rates doing at each level? What are the outcomes of education? How do we lift all of these? There will be myriad matters that require meetings about topics that contribute to those defining questions and discussions so I am not saying that meetings are not important. What makes them important is their contribution to those fundamental issues.

In a modern environment there are alternatives to face-to-face meetings. There is merit in using chat rooms, blogs and suchlike to hold asynchronous meetings in which participants over say 24 hours contribute to discussion of an issue perhaps as a preparatory clearing of the decks for a really focussed shorter meeting of key people. And this raises another issue. Sometimes it is important for “a” group to meet about something but it ends up with the wrong group addressing it – a group is not necessarily this group!

So here is where there might be a case for a modular meeting. A core group of say three people manage the business of a particular area but their meetings are modular and include others depending on the capacity of different people to contribute to the discussion or a particular topic for varying lengths of time. This should produce a meeting that is well planned, well managed and timed.

But, on the other hand, I forget who said it but there is some wisdom in the statement that if you live in a country run by committee, be on the committee!

Stuart Middleton
EdTalkNZ
23 February 2012

One of my favourite cartoons is a Jules Feiffer (NY Times) in which an old man sits in his chair and reflects.

“I used to think to think I was poor.

Then they told me I wasn’t poor, I was needy.

Then they told me it was self-defeating to think of myself as needy, I was deprived.

Then they told me deprived was a bad image, I was underprivileged.

Then they told me underprivileged was over-used. I was disadvantaged.

I still don’t have a dime.

But I have a great vocabulary!”

I thought of this on several recent occasions when I have got involved in discussions about words to use when describing the groups of students who enjoy little success in education systems. It’s an international issue – what you refer to them as. So too is the fact that such groups exist!

We have a range of words at our disposal that includes underserved, underrepresented, disadvantaged, special needs, and so on. Each captures something of the essence of the groups we are talking about but each also carries with it, like all words, certain linguistic baggage.

Special Needs

Often this is used to refer to students who require different or enhanced approaches. In New Zealand it seems largely to have been applied to students with disabilities of some kind or another and there is a reluctance, appropriate I think, to apply it to students who are largely without disability but who are not making progress.

This has some difficulties. For instance, if a student enters a system with a language background that is different from the lingua franca of the system then clearly they have “a special need”. If a student is gifted in mathematics, they have “a special need.”  There might even be a case to be made that each and every student has a special need but…

Disadvantaged

This word usefully describes a phenomenon – disadvantage – and is less precise about its target. Disadvantage can be the result of a number of things which do not produce a positive outcome and leave an individual not able to enjoy benefits that others can. Being hard of hearing in a meeting in a noisy setting produces disadvantage. So disadvantage is a useful word but has limitations when applied to a student. The disadvantage is usually a set of factors that are outside the student or wrapped up in the inability of the education system to work effectively with students from a diverse range of backgrounds or social settings. It is not a useful description because it blurs the sources of disadvantage.

Underrepresented

Now this is a factual description. In the US there is no doubt about who is being referred to when the term “traditionally underrepresented” is used. Take the winners in examinations – who is not there in the numbers they should be? Take the NCEA results – why is there discrepant figures for different groups? I like “underrepresented” as a word that draws attention to flaws in statements and results and analyses. Take the PISA results – yes we do brilliantly but which groups are underrepresented in sharing that brilliant performance. Conversely, take the NEETs group and which groups are “overrepresented”?

Underserved

This is a trickier word. Does it imply blame? Does it picture the relationships between teachers and students, schools and communities, education systems and groups within the population as ones in which one party are responsible for “serving” the other? Well yes it does and so it should. But one can “serve” without any hint of “subservience”.

If in the queue for breakfast the kitchen runs out of food before everyone has their food, some will not be served. If this repeatedly happens to the same group, they are most certainly “underserved” by the kitchen and, frankly, only the kitchen can solve it.

So “underserved” means something different from the others, it is based on a pattern and in education systems that pattern is pretty clear for some groups. So too is it in health systems, housing provision, the employment stakes and so on. It is not peculiar to education. Where there are systems there are generally individuals and groups that are underserved.

All this is a difficult issue because people bring meaning to words that might differ from the intended meaning of those who write or speak them. Do we call those we teach “students” or “pupils” – they are not exactly synonymous but both are better than the ubiquitously used “kids”, this makes us seem like goats!

There are discussions often about teaching and learning – that’s an easy one.

Of course we could simply refer accurately to the groups who generally do not benefit from education systems to the same extent as other groups. These are clear across different countries – Maori and Pasifika in New Zealand, Aboriginal communities in Australia, First Nations groups in Canada, Hispanic and African American in the USA and in the UK, children from immigrant groups. Across all these countries those who bring English as an additional language to the system will have some uphill paths to tread, it doesn’t pay to be of low socio-economic status (i.e. poor) and students with special needs will require strong advocacy to get the help they need and are entitled to.

We know all this, we know that we are not getting the results we should and must. Doing something about it requires us not to talk about it but to act on it. It is the results students get not the way they are described that will make a difference. It is what we do not what we say that will lead to more equitable outcomes.

“Priority learners” is gaining ground in New Zealand lately. I worry about how that word attracts “high” and “low” so easily.

Stuart Middleton
EdTalkNZ
15 February 2012

I have no understanding why it is so. Perhaps it is because we have two arms, two legs, two eyes, two ears and lots of other bits and pieces in twos. But humans like us seem to have a fixation about binary opposites – life and death, night and day, evil and good, yin and yang. This last pair does shed some light on the issue – they are opposites, each cannot exist without the other, they impact on each other through mutual consumption and, I read, “one can change into the other, but it is not a random event, happening only when the time is right. For example: Spring only comes when winter is finished.”

This might be helpful in understanding why we are so fond of such distinctions in education – content/theory, product/process, and of course learning/teaching. But no distinction is more of an issue than that odd couple, “academic” and “vocational”.

Once there was something of a distinction. Academic was higher education, it was learning about much that improved the quality of life, of thinking and was the basis of an educated and knowledgeable person. Its purpose was not explicitly utilitarian. And this persisted until quite recently.

In the 1970s I went to school one day and mentioned to a group of colleagues that I had finished my DipEd to complement my MA. The Head of the Languages Department’s only comment was “Ah, Stuart, teachers might have an MA DipEd but gentlemen simply have an MA.” The grubby trappings of a vocational qualification were not for him.

But things have changed. The first is that the universities have become blatantly vocational. It is likely that this has been driven within the university by marketing and outside it by a community awash with cupidity. Increasingly degrees are offered that relate to a job rather than to an academic discipline – teaching, town planning, natural therapies, physiotherapy and so on. This reverse creeping credentialism (the modern dumbing down) has ushered in a decline in the value placed on the generic degrees such as BA and BSc that were once the platform from which post-graduate work of a more specifically employment related nature (sometimes taught outside the university) was possible.

A further issue is that there is no longer any clear vertical distinction between the vocational and the academic.  Much that qualifies people for work in business, industry and commerce which is vocational is very academic. The academic demands of such programmes are substantial. It used to be the case that you could enter professions (or were they vocations?) such as nursing and teaching with a middle level of achievement in a secondary school. Now you must enter the profession through the degree portal. Has the work changed to that extent?

And has this worked? Hardly.

When I reached the end of my primary schooling I was enrolled for a carpentry course at a Technical High School. This was a vocational secondary school that offered a wide range of technical and commercial subjects that led quickly into employment. The primary school Principal intervened and cautioned my parents that I should not pursue this vocational pathway because I was academic. For many years I was a very poor academic (and might well still be). Looking back there is some regret that we took notice of the advice.

The system largely solved the issue of increased difficulty in leading young people into employment by spreading comprehensive secondary education across our system and cleansing the curriculum of vocational skills other than in a generalised way that was academic and in no sense clearly vocational. And this was largely because the tracking / streaming that was implied by the system that was used to pursue vocational pathways became discredited. We had no choice but to try retain students longer in secondary education and this has had mixed success.

Consequently the issues of the academic / vocational debate have been transferred to the tertiary sector. But without the secondary / tertiary interface becoming blurred and porous, the grip on vocational courses by institutions that see themselves as academic will result in them becoming less accessible.

We will only start to meet the needs of all students if institutions do not continue to dine out, gorge indeed, on the sacred nature of that which is academic.

Academic is the new vocational. And vocational now requires much better academic preparation than the education system is currently delivering. As Dorothy Meier said back in 1994, “That academics has become the path all children must pursue in order to meet their non-academic aspirations – from engineer to lawyer to bookkeeper – is absurd”  If it was absurd back then it must surely the height of silliness now.

The use of academic and vocational is no longer a distinction and has instead become a distraction.

Stuart Middleton
EdTalkNZ
16 February 2012

The importance of educational success to economic growth is now well and truly accepted across many discipline. It was interesting therefore to have my attention drawn last week to a report from the OECD that argues increased investment in “disadvantaged schools and students to ensure that everyone gets a fair chance.”

The proportion of 25-34 years-old who have not completed upper secondary school now averages 20%. New Zealand is listed at 21% but look at the countries that are lower than us: Greece, Italy, Iceland, Spain, Portugal, Mexico and Turkey. Do these names ring a bell in recent media coverage about weak economies, threats of depression and civil unrest? WE are running a risk of joining a club the membership of which a greatly not to be sought in economic terms.

The basic argument of the report is simple. The disengaged, the drop-outs, “are most often from poor or immigrant families, or have poorly educated parents. They are also more likely to attend schools with fewer resources, and their parents cannot generally afford private tutoring.” Are the bells still ringing?

The OECD Report suggests five strategies for tackling the issue.

1          Eliminate the repetition of material studies, levels repeated, having a second shot in order to improve results

New Zealand doesn’t do much of this which is estimated to consume as much as 10% of the annual spending on schooling in some countries. Rather, we push students on to the next level regardless and create considerable accumulated failure as a result. We run a lock-step system. If we were able to work genuinely towards individual pathway plans (call them what you will) we could reach higher levels of effectiveness. A start would be clear unequivocal statements about expectation for learning at crucial points

2          Avoid early tracking or streaming where lower tracks  are generally an educational death warrant.

In the general education system we have pretty well done away with tracking (or streaming as we know it) but in order to throw it out, we indiscriminately also threw out the capacity to provide genuinely differentiated programme in the senior secondary school for which we have paid a heavy price and about which I have written on many occasions.

3          Manage school choice to avoid segregation

It is a clear international trend to improve parental choice. But in doing so it is difficult to avoid segregation between school type or characteristics. Just as our worst areas of housing in New Zealand are the direct outcome of planning decisions – those suburbs were generally planned and built quite deliberately. Now we wonder how to transform them.

So too with schools and this is exacerbated by the convenience of the decile labelling system. The report concludes that there needs to be positive discrimination in favour of disadvantaged schools and financial incentives for advantaged schools to take their share of the high maintenance students from disadvantaged communities.

4          Allocate funding according to student needs and invest in early age.

No argument here. But how? Well obviously the decile rating system gives us a crude tool to know where disadvantaged students are clustered. If we are serious, we would be directing greatly increased funding in that direction but, here’s the rub, not simply to continue to do what we have always done! And managing the accountability/autonomy equation more effectively would also help.

Perhaps the proportions spent on sectors need addressing. The OECD average spend on see 2.5 times more spent on tertiary education than on the early childhood education system.  (In New Zealand that difference is a whacking 3.8 times in favour of tertiary. We are probably getting the results we can expect from the investments we are making.

5          “Encourage students to complete by improving the quality of secondary-level vocational training courses including work-based training, and making the different secondary pathways equivalent.”

This is heartening since New Zealand is starting to recognise just these actions as critical to turning around the issues of disengagement and dropping out. Youth Guarantee, Trades Academies, Service Academies, Vocational Pathways, Secondary / Tertiary Programmes, Gateway and STAR are all policies and actions that have the potential to impact on those issues. We also have through NCEA the potential to give equivalence between pathways even though there is a possibility of this being put at risk by changes made to NCEA and the promotion of alternative examinations. Strong government leadership is required in this area.

So if New Zealand aspires to climb up from 26^th (out of 34 countries) in the OECD disengagement/drop-out stakes it might pay to give attention to reports such as this. I shudder to think of where we would be if we were not a bipolar system that has an extraordinary high level of performance for enough students to balance against the high level of underachievement.

Is there a tipping point in all this? And how far ahead might it be?

Stuart Middleton
EdTalkNZ
13 February 2012

From time to time every educator should get into learning at the deep end!

I had decided that I would like to swim for exercise for a change and that would mean I would have to swim better than I could. So I have enrolled in lessons.

Of course, like most learners I had considered that I could swim all those years since being taught in primary school. I am not at all sure that the teachers who bravely stood at the edge of the pool and sent us back and forth across the shallow end with wooden flutter boards met the requirements for swimming instruction but they did their best.

Even though it was a primary school, the pool was very deep indeed at the deep end and we were strictly not allowed to head in that direction. So there was much fund raising and a better learner’s pool was opened just after we left. When we got to intermediate school there was no pool and with much fundraising a pool was built and opened just after we left. At high school there was similarly no pool and after huge fundraising a pool opened just a few weeks before we left.

We spent a lot of time at the pools in Hamilton, the one at Hamilton Technical College was large and new and the “Municipal Pool” large and old. But all that time spent over many summers never improved our basic skill in swimming.

There was a degree of paranoia in my family generated by my Grandmother who thought that danger started when the water reached your knees which limited the opportunities to actually swim. We were expected to enjoy the ocean to the same extent and in much the same way as a pod of stranded whales might enjoy the ocean.

One Sunday at the Hamilton Lake I fell fully clothed off the little jetty thing that was jutted out into water well above my depth. I was grateful that bystanders fetched me back up onto the jetty. Was Grandma thrilled that I was safe? If she was it didn’t show as I was soundly admonished for swimming when I had been clearly told not to. You can understand why water sports didn’t feature much among our activities.

So it has been off to lessons. I have long believed that when you are learning something there is a very small number of things that must be understood, principles that are central and critical to your understanding and consequent performance. The first lesson was a revelation as the teacher described some basic principles of swimming that I had never had pointed out to me over many years.

These really are quite simple – when you swim your body should be very straight from the tips of your fingers to your toes, you kick from the hips not the knees, keep your chin down and when you turn your head to breathe turn your shoulders with it.

Now understanding these has been very helpful and my previous fish-out-of-water thrashing is slowly being replaced by the swift gliding motion of graceful boat through the water. (That last bit is an exaggeration really but I can honestly report that there has been pleasing progress.)

I will not reveal which pool where all this is happening as I do not want crowds to gather to see this such as happened with Opo in the Hokianga back in the summer of 1955-1956 but it is an urban pool, free to the community and very well used. My lessons have been at 12.10pm on a Sunday. The pools have generally been crowded at that time except for the lanes kept clear for instruction.

This added to my anxiety. I felt some nervousness about this. Would I be the object of amusement being several years older than the clientele generally? What if I came across someone I knew? Would my egg-beater style attract attention of the wrong sort? Would I be humiliated?

You see, being a learner is a pretty exposed state to be in.

What I quickly realised was that nobody other than the teacher took the slightest bit of notice of my having a lesson – anxiety is such an egocentric thing!  They all went about their business at the pools and left me to what I was doing. The worries were in my head and not actually real. That is typical of learners too. No Mummy!  They will laugh at me. I won’t be able to do it! I don’t know anyone in the class!

But as with so many five year olds, I left the first lesson exhilarated and happy – this is going to be good, I will achieve what I was wanting which was to swim with ease. More importantly, something that had until now been tedious will become more enjoyable. It’s neat how good learning experiences enable you to leave the shallow end and get into it in more depth!

Stuart Middleton
EdTalkNZ
9 February 2011

A number of times lately in discussion with different kinds of people, the question of which word we should choose to describe the post-formal education destination of a students has arisen.

I favour using the simple word “job”. But this I am told is limiting and “career” would be a better choice. Even “employment” seems to be favoured ahead of “job”. But the words we use matter and the words that have impact on students matter. Our thinking is not just formulated by the words we used but actually formed by them. They are very important.

This is not a trivial issue. Currently questions are being raised about the effectiveness of “careers” advice and much thought is being directed at the nature of it, the way it works and when it should be delivered.

Let me nail my piece to the door. I believe that “career” is a concept that comes largely after the event. It is a qualitative judgment about a person’s continuous work over a long period of time. It is often used by people other than the person it is being applied to. “She has had a stellar career” might well be said of a person who could be reluctant to think of herself in these terms.

Children in middle class homes, the homes of the professionals, grow up with a sense of what a “career” is because there are people in the home who have had one, or know of people who have.

A “career” is something of a collective noun for a series of jobs that are connected and cumulatively add up to something.

I don’t want to here discuss careers education other than to say that it seems to me to be a lot like sex education – too little, too late and when it happens, overly obsessed with the mechanics of connection.

We might get much more traction and reach new levels of effectiveness in the advice we give to young people by using the word “job”. Is the point of education the development of a sets of skills, knowledge, dispositions and aspirations that will carry people into a job with enthusiasm and certain in their knowledge that their education will continue even though their schooling might stop?

That is why multiple exit points and pathways are needed. Some students need to make the school / job transition more quickly than others, some need to get onto a pathway along which they clearly see a job waiting for them at an earlier point. Others can sustain a more distant view of a job, perhaps even wrapped up in the concept of a career but not many.

So, let’s start being comfortable with the practice of making clear the link between “schooling” and “jobs” with a view to getting increased numbers into work. Such a commitment will not dent in any way the numbers who are heading for university or who have a view of where they are going. However it will be absolutely central to making inroads into the ranks of the disengaging and those who leave school to drift into the NEET group.

Making explicit the purpose of schooling is an important change we could make if we are to tackle the issues of dropping out and disengagement. We need to agree on and then work to a clear equation:   Schooling + Job = Purpose.  There is plenty of evidence that purpose is the very thing that many successful students have and many unsuccessful students do not. It might also be the difference between an effective teacher and an ineffective one (and this is not a comment on competence).

Perhaps the confusion about schooling that a group of students has is shared by their teachers. This is sad if it is true for such teachers will find it hard to aspire to a “career” in teaching and will instead become increasingly unhappy about the “job”.

The old battle cry of the teaching world in the 1960’s was “Give us the tools and we will do the job!” By and large any increase in resources was used to continue to do the same thing and not surprisingly the results were the same. Now demographic pressures and the realities of the sort of economy we have, demand different results which can only result from working differently.

A good start would be an affirmation that education should lead to a job and that this could happen at a number of points none of which need threaten the pathways that see students reach high levels of qualifications. But we must attack that group who end their encounter with education after eight or ten or 13 years and are either unemployable or ill-prepared to continue in education. It is not a mystery.

An orientation on “jobs” might be the solution.

Stuart Middleton
EdTalkNZ
2 February 2012

I really thought that the whole Charter School thing would simply die away but no, the Government is keen to pursue the idea.

Well let’s get a few things straight. The development of Charter Schools in other countries was intended to produce a new kind of school that could challenge the conventional schools. So what are the key characteristics of a Charter School?

1.    Charter Schools are freed from the direct control of a Department of Education or an education board or a local authority.

In the USA and the UK schools are typically under the tight control of a department of education, a schools district or board. The charter schools were set up to free them from this and to give to each school some autonomy.

Tomorrow’s Schools gave to New Zealand schools exactly the same level of autonomy that Charter Schools have.

2.      Charter Schools have a charter.

So does each and every New Zealand School. Unlike New Zealand schools where the Charter is between the Government and the local community (as represented in the Board of Trustees), the overseas Charter Schools could have such Charters between any number of groups and the Government. But actually there is some evidence that where the Charter is with a community-based group, the Charter School is likely to be more successful so we are already on the right road!

Our integrated schools and independent schools have a similar arrangement where the “Charter” is between the “proprietors” and the Government.

 3.    Charter Schools have the freedom to appoint their own staff.

So do all New Zealand schools. We forget that New Zealand schools have an autonomy that is unparalleled in other English speaking-countries.

 4.    Charter Schools are bulk funded.

So too could New Zealand schools be bulk-funded and indeed that was the intention some time ago but ideology won out in the end and it was withdrawn. It remains the last great freedom that New Zealand schools could have and there will be little accountability in the schooling system until it is achieved. So let’s not think that we need Charter Schools to achieve this.

 5.    Charter Schools have a special focus or special character.

So to can New Zealand schools and indeed some have in their charter the right to focus on a special character. We have not exploited this to any great extent. Charter Schools in the USA especially have a special character that is related to an interest (performing arts etc) or a discipline (STEM is popular) and so on. We could be much more adventurous in this area and the only progress we have made is to see a handful of primary schools have a special focus on technology. Of course the church schools have a special character, so too do the kura kaupapa.

 6.    Charter Schools select their students usually by ballot.

We use this where there is demand but the difference is that Charter Schools have no zone and they compete for students across a wider range of the community. Since it takes a certain kind of parent /caregiver to seek these opportunities for their children (and I have no issue with that) it is a selection of a selection that finally get to go to them.

 7.    Charter Schools attract private money and sponsorship.

This is a peculiarly American thing. Private money flows easily to US schools and colleges – it is simply the American Way. Indeed Bill Gates set out to put right what he saw as one of the key things wrong with the entire world – the American High School. The other thing wrong with the world was, in his view, communicable diseases. He has this week announced that his sole focus would now be on these diseases.

There is no tradition of private funding of state schools in New Zealand and what examples we have are valuable to the schools but relatively minor in nature.

8.    Charter Schools have been set up to be the panacea.

What Bill Gates discovered was that there was no panacea in education. Quality is quality; good is good and better is better.

Like most school systems, Charter Schools are a mixed bag – some work well, some fail and most are indistinguishable in their outcomes from the government system they sought to replace. We do not need an experiment or trial in New Zealand to find out all that is abundantly clear already.

The risk we take with the Charter Schools effort is to be distracted from the facts. All New Zealand schools have the advantages of a Charter School and the challenge to those who would make changes is to see that they are all, without exception, excellent Charter Schools.

And that is the big wake-up call. It is the Government that is the body holding the Charter for each New Zealand school and with that, comes responsibility. We are a small system and well within our grasp to get things right in every school. Then we can hold our heads high and say that New Zealand got the Charter School thing right.

Stuart Middleton
EdTalkNZ
30 January 2012

So it’s back to school this week and the media are starting to grind out their annual stories that they dust off and make a gesture to updating at this time of the year.

At the top of the list is the question of cost.

This year the initial focus has been on stationery and the direction of parents towards a specific supplier. Of course the schools are clipping the ticket and getting a payment directly as a result.  The company then tries to cover itself in by describing these payments as “grants” to the school under its benevolent and philanthropic scheme which will have a catchy little name of some sort.

When I went to school we got the cheapest books we could find and covered them with wall paper.  Nowadays when they cover exercise books it is with a synthetic material that sticks to the books.  This is excellent occupational therapy for the parents that end up doing it.

Stationery is stationery.  Unless schools can show that they have secured a good deal for parents, a better deal than the parents could get on their own, they should stay out of it.

Then in a few days the story about school uniforms will appear in our papers.  This is now another anachronism in education.  Someone claimed to me the other day that the single achievement of the administrative reform of schools (as in Tomorrow’s Schools) had been to put primary kids into uniform.  I doubt very much whether a school can dress its students more cheaply than any school uniform.  I look in the windows of those uniform shops as I pass and on the basis of such scientific evidence, confirm that this is so.

A funny thing is that when I went to school there was no uniform but when I look at the school photos, invariably the boys are clad in grey and even a surprising number of the girls are wearing gym tunics of the old fashioned kind.  But our school clothes would have been in the category of “tidy” perhaps even “going out” clothes and so got a use that was wider than any school uniform of garish colour, quaint checks, logos and stripes ever would.

So with the wide availability of young persons’ clothing at cheap prices, the days of school uniforms should be numbered.  And the old argument that uniforms make it evident who should be at school and are a deterrent to truancy is well and truly defeated by the facts.

There could be an argument to be made about sunhats.  It is a sensible requirement for which compulsion can be justified.

So, stationery and uniforms will tie the media up this first week.  Then there is a lull while the media gets back into its diet of wall-to-wall coverage of road smashes, its continued support for the cult of the victim (of all kinds) and, since there is still time before summer ends, some competition that sees our morning paper filled with contributions from readers.

But by Week 3 it will be time for the hardy annual – the shock horror story of school fees.  Of course no-one cares what the independents do, they charge what they like and their parents like what they charge since they are too polite to say otherwise.

But parents of children attending state school do ask the question: “If my child goes to a state school in a system that has since 1877 claimed to have a system that is free, compulsory and secular, why do I get a bill for a sum of money to have my child compulsorily attend this free school?  This is a good question and it never gets a convincing answer.

In truth, these fees are charged by schools because they can get away with it. And this education black market distorts funding in an extraordinary way.  High decile schools rake it in while low decile schools do not.  The schools with arguably the greatest need are the ones with the weakest power in this.

It really should be regulated for reasons that are about equity, ethical behaviour and, indeed, the legal framework within which schools operate.  But as sure as there are little green apples, the practice will continue, the complaints will be aired and nothing will be done to address it.

How refreshing it will be if the newspapers prove me to be wrong.

Stuart Middleton
EdTalkNZ
23 January 2012

It’s that time again when all over the country students set off to start another calendar year of schooling, education and training. Some of those students will be the first batch of the 30,000 or so who will start school for the first time having reached that magic day, their fifth birthday. What a wonderful thing it is that we retain this tradition rather than do the bulk lot thing that they do in other systems (the Feb or Sept start).

The social contract is clear. Students are required to attend school regularly starting at the appropriate age, do what is asked of them, develop appropriate social behaviours and wear correct uniform. For their part, schools are required to teach a specific curriculum to a set of specific standards. If each party meets its obligations a young person should be able to face a secure future with knowledge, skills and aspirations that will take them into adulthood and able to earn a family sustaining age.

Well, that is all very well and good in theory. Increasingly schooling in schools is not enough and a postsecondary qualification is essential. So that brings into play another set of complexities – tertiary education. The young one’s starting school do not realise the extent to which that will present challenges that they are not often able to control.

So all of these little ones and their bigger brothers and sisters setting off to school at the moment in their new polo shirts of primary colours and sun hats big enough to camp under, face a treacherous pathway ahead. Actually they would have walked to school once upon a time but now an armoured division of SUVs will see them safely to school in many suburbs while in others parents will walk to school with them.

Do they know what their chances are?

I did a little study – what a real statistician would call a quick and dirty job – of a cohort of 100 New Zealand babies, right numbers of different ethnicities and so on, and applied what we know to be the success/failure trajectories of each group. I concluded that of those 100 babies born last year, only 29 would achieve a postsecondary qualification on the current performance of the education system, 71 would not. And I do not mean a degree qualification. I mean anything from a postsecondary certificate up. So about one in three will reach the minimum level of qualifications required.

That aligns with what we know to be the picture of disengagement and I do not see evidence that suggests that there is a trend of improvement. The increase in disengagement is stubbornly resistant to the efforts of educators.

One reason is that the demographics are working against us – the groups of students we teach well and to internationally stunning levels are getting smaller while the groups that struggle (and have for longer than we care to admit) are getting bigger.

Add to that the steady placement of vocational education options at increasingly older entry levels along with a blind belief that the comprehensive secondary school might meet the needs of all students (it never has in the past why should it now?) and that figure of 29% successfully competing a postsecondary qualification looks to be a stretch in 30 or 40 years.

Change in the education system is urgently needed and that is up to the grown ups not the little ones. So here is an agenda for professional concerns in 2012:

First, all jurisdictions want accountability one way or another so get over it and move on. If National Standards are right then change them but work constructively in the system rather than continue to bamboozle the community by staunchly rejecting standards – well that is how it seems to an outsider.

Secondly, seriously question whether we have been pulling the wool over the community’s eyes on the question of what schools can actually do. Less is more in curriculum design so sorting out what matters and doing that will make all the other stuff easy to do. If someone can read well they can do anything. Equitable access to technology is more important than more programmes (admit it, you got a gadget for Xmas and gave it to your grandchild to show you how to get it going).

Let’s be adamant about what schools can do and then ensure that we do that stuff so well that each and every student will receive a brilliant start in life through education.

Thirdly, get purpose into the lives of young people at school. Why they are there is the most important factor – if I ask a child in school the question “Why are you doing that?” and they cannot answer I seriously question the quality of the teaching.

Related to this is that focus on the end game of education. Forty years ago when everything seemed to be working and most people were in fact working, a central goal of education was to equip people to work. Is that such a bad thing? Sanitising education so that it is not tainted by vocational goals is crazy. Actually the universities know this and are blatantly vocational under the guise of being the critics and conscious of other people.

Having a strong focus on employability in real jobs need not in any way jeopardise the attainment of a liberal education which is in fact one which liberates and what could be more liberating to those imprisoned by educational failure to have such a quality education?

None of this seems very difficult really. It is just that it is urgent! Those little fellows starting the journey over the next 10 days or so need to be assured that it is worthwhile. The results in the school success statistics in 2025 will not be some disembodied set of figures, they will in fact be each and every one of these little ones.

Stuart Middleton
EDTalkNZ
15 December 2011

There is always interest when the captain of the team tells who will be playing in what position and the announcement of the cabinet posts earlier this week was no exception.

In fact this single theme could well serve this government right across the array of education sectors. Accountability in education in New Zealand is not one of our strong points – no-one is clearly held responsible for failure and disengagement. If we are to have National Standards for the schooling sector, the close scrutiny of NCEA results and accountability measures and levers for the tertiary sector then let’s develop a scorecard for the performance of a government in education and the performance of the Education Ministers as a team.

The Auckland Council has set the pace in this by building into its Auckland Plan clear goals , targets and priorities in education that are centred on three clear statements well familiar to readers of EdTalkNZ – 100% access to quality early childhood education, Level 2 NCEA for each and every young person and postsecondary qualification for all school leavers. The team of government education Ministers would do well to focus on these as a measure for the difference they make while in office.

And as they should be measured as a team, it will be no good if each of them simply gets on with their patch while ignoring the fact that young people have to navigate a system characterised by transitions and tracks that seemingly lack continuity. They will have to work together. So what about each Ministers role?

The continuity in the Tertiary Education portfolio is welcomed and Hon Steven Joyce will bring the sort of focus that is critical to continuing the progress to towards a system that is accountable for results and measured by them. Without the distraction of ships sitting on rocks and trains running under the rocks in Auckland, the Minister can with profit focus on working with his Minister of Education colleague to make Youth Guarantee (something of a flagship policy for this government) reach full expression.

The Minister of Education, Hon Hekia Parata, brings wide experience in the state sector to the role and provided that there can be a clear focus in her tenure in the role, she will do well. The being-all-things-to-all-people-approach has never worked and will never work. I would not think that Minister Parata will fall into that trap. Schooling is a simple process – students arrive at school ready to go – well more of them would if we got the ECE business right – and over 9 years lay the foundations for future learning.

A focus in the nine years of a general education simply has to be on essential skills and knowledge. We get it brilliantly right with the top end of the cohort and the challenge is to get it right for all young ones. To achieve this, schools will have to do more by doing less. Focus will be everything.

The new Minister can be expected to bring to her role an understanding of the importance of first languages and their impact on literacy development. Her colleague Hon Pita Sharples knows about all this with regard to Maori young ones and should be given scope to get on with doing what is necessary. As Minister of Education, Minister Parata might direct a lot of attention to the language needs and development of Pacific Island young ones (useful here that she is also Minister of Pacific Island Affairs), the migrant communities and Pakeha whose start in life simply hasn’t prepared them for school.

New Zealand is blessed in having an educator of the calibre of Hon Pita Sharples in the role of Associate Minister of Education. He talks about this being his last term. He must be given the opportunity to make a lasting impression as an Associate Minister of Education (and appropriately as Minister of Māori Affairs – he has much to offer to us all.

And completing the team of Education Ministers is Associate Minister of Education, Hon John Banks. I do not think for one minute that his call for charter schools was anything more than the exuberance of the agreement between ACT and the Government and his appointment to the role. It certainly wasn’t based on the ACT Manifesto, the needs of young people or the evidence that is available to us from other countries. If he wants to make a contribution he should realise that all New Zealand schools have the attributes of a charter school and set about helping the team assist all New Zealand schools to be high performing and results driven.

This concept of a team of ministers will be critical. I have written many times of the disastrous lack of connection between the parts of school in New Zealand (simply because we want so much to be like the US, the UK. Australia, and parts of Canada). If our Education Ministers can act like a team in which developments and decisions are assessed against a template of a connected and seamless education system and are measured not only for their effect in one Minister’s patch but also for their effect across the other patches, we might start to make progress.

Systemic discontinuity is clearly the greatest obstacle faced by learners in New Zealand. Any serious effort to address it at the delivery end has to be matched by an even greater effort in the approach the Government takes to education in its team of ministers. Actually it has also to be matched by a set of seamless relationships between the MOE and NZQA and TEC and ERO.

All this sounds like a Royal Commission or must they be reserved only for physical disasters?  

We wish the team of Education Ministers well.

Guest blogger, Colleen Young, Administrator, Centre for Studies in Multiple Pathways, joins us today.

The “one-size-fits-all” education system is tearing our secondary student body apart.  Granted, for some students the academic route is working, but for an increasing number of students in the English speaking countries, senior school students are becoming bored with the curriculum on offer, experiencing little educational success and they are very likely to fail within the current system. Educational policy-makers are constantly searching for answers. 

Recently I visited two Early College High Schools in the United States. This is a new form of schooling founded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation aimed at improving student success for minority students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds.  It was refreshing to see re-engaged students who knew their future career pathways and how they were going to get there. In one of the schools, two Grade 10 (Year 11) students took me on tour.  They were so proud of their school.  They loved their integrated secondary/postsecondary programme and when they introduced me to their teachers; it was obvious that they had formed quality relationships with them.  So, what did these schools have in common and why were both schools achieving such excellent educational outcomes for the students?

For a start, like the Tertiary High School, based at Manukau Institute of Technology, for Year 11-Year 13 students, both schools are situated on campus.  There are no tuition or book costs for up to five years. Studying on site at the College eases the students into the new postsecondary environment and makes for a smooth transition.

In addition, the funding of the institutions differed from a traditional school. Both schools were initially, (and one of them still is) funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation which gave the schools complete autonomy and removed them from the state system.  Fierce marketing done by each of the schools allowed prospective students and their families to understand the Early College High School concept. The target audience is similar to the Tertiary High School where students may apply who come from lower socioeconomic, low income families, underrepresented groups and who are possibly first generations, college going students. 

Demand for places always exceeded supply.  Students who were lucky enough to gain a place in one of these schools are able to learn in a small school between 100 and 200 students.  As a result these students are able to receive more one-on-one academic and social support. Teachers work individually with students to remove any barriers they may be facing that may be inhibiting their educational success. Knowing some students miss out on a place may mean the students valued their place more than the place they had in their previous school.  This appeared to be the case as from what I saw wandering around the classrooms the students appeared to be working hard and enjoying their learning experience.  Staff that I spoke to said they had very few behavioural problems.

To conclude, there appear to be four differences in these two schools in comparison to the traditional school model.   These are:  the way a school is funded in terms of staffing and resources, the autonomy for decision making, the creation of a collaborative and flexible integrated programme between the two institutions which is relevant, interesting, challenging and rigorous for the students; and a small school which in turn allows for smaller class sizes therefore providing more time for individual teacher and student interaction.

The question remains:  Can our senior secondary schools change the way the programmes are developed and delivered to the senior students which in turn would mean increasing the collaboration between secondary and tertiary institutions?  In addition, could the policies be adapted so that funding can follow the student?  If so, then more students at risk of failing in our traditional school system could be given access to a variety of career options and opportunities in order to create a brighter and happier future for them.

Stuart Middleton
EdTalkNZ
8 December 2011

Who would have predicted that the idea of Charter Schools would have emerged from the volatility of an MMP election? It is a time for quiet and calm reflection on the matter rather than our usual search for the boxing gloves for three rounds in the ring.

Charter Schools go back to 1988 in the USA when the notion that the introduction of autonomous public schools with a clear focus on student achievement would address the stubborn issues in English-speaking education systems (and especially the USA) of the poor performance of too many students who seemingly were clustered in too many schools. Nothing unusual in that and New Zealand then and still (like the USA) continues to address that very same issue.

Charter Schools were to have a charter, an agreement between the state, the government, and the school, increased autonomy, a more flexible reach for students that went beyond the mandated zones and an ability to access funding from outside the conventional public / state funding.

Does all this sound familiar? It should. Because in 1989 the New Zealand government handed to all New Zealand schools the very same degree of autonomy. Every school was to be a charter school, there was to be increased flexibility of access (the zoning system was to challenged), funding could be used by the school flexibly (it was called bulk funding) and relationships between schools and business was to be allowed to flourish. All this followed the development of state integrated schools – early precursors of the charter model.

No education system in the world gives schools the autonomy they have in New Zealand but it is beyond the scope of this short piece to provide a commentary on what happened to all this but the point is that the notion of a “charter school” is not new to New Zealand and the concept has by and large been found to not be a silver bullet.

The critics of the charter school idea are silly to claim that the idea has been tried and has failed in the USA and the UK. It is just as silly to claim the idea has been an unqualified success. The truth is that charter schools have been about as good and as bad as public / state school systems. The jury is out on this idea. It would be foolish for us to go chasing after the concept at this time and there is no sound educational argument that we should.

Of course, the ideological argument which is really no argument at all, might win the day and we could continue the tradition of New Zealand claiming what it sees as its God-given right to suck up ideas from other education systems regardless of evidence of success or appropriateness. As for a trial or two – the road to hell is paved with good intentions and failed / stalled / forgotten education pilot programmes from New Zealand.

We need step changes at this time if we are to more successfully get on top of the issues of student achievement and success and the irony of the charter school proposal in both its nature and its timing is that the current government is on some productive tracks towards making progress in doing just that.

Regardless of whether teacher unions and principal associations like it or not, National Standards or something like it is essential to maintaining public confidence in state education. It was a lack of confidence in public education in the USA that unleashed the charter movement. New Zealand has never experienced the comprehensive lack of confidence in state education that other systems, the US, the UK and to a lesser degree Australia, have had to cope with. But it is not a given and we need to work at it. The primary sector needs to get on with the job of making National Standards work and the secondary sector should look forward to their introduction in some form or other for Years 9 and 10.

At the senior secondary school the government (and its MMP partners) would be advised to have confidence in its Youth Guarantee policy setting that seems likely to not only address achievement issues but articulate the school system into the wider world in ways that will enhance student success.

Continuing access to a free education in places other than the secondary school is both equitable and already successful. This is achieved within the existing education and training system at about the same cost as the conventional tracks in which so many of the students would simply fail.

The development of alternate ways of completing secondary schooling through mixed mode programmes (such as trades academies and secondary tertiary programmes) or through programmes such as the Tertiary High School are already leading increasing numbers of students to successful outcomes and qualifications.

The development of Vocational Pathways within NCEA is adding the sophistication to NCEA that was always meant to be there but was thwarted by the pressures to turn it into another examination system.

Meanwhile the performance of students at the top end of academic achievement is simply second to none in world terms.

In short, given continued commitment to the directions currently being pursued, we are likely to have success in addressing the issues of educational outcomes. Not only that, we will have found ways of doing this which are a good fit with the way we work – this is New Zealand and this is how we do it! A new maturity will emerge in an education system that has in the past lead the way.

One final point. There is neither the tradition nor an appetite in the New Zealand business and philanthropic communities to use its money to take over what it sees as the responsibility of the state in the ways that there is especially in the USA. Relationships? Yes. Lending complementary skills? Yes. Partnerships? Yes. Picking up the tab for failure? No.

We have some frameworks in place, now we need focus and commitment, not distraction.

Stuart Middleton
EdTalkNZ
28 November 2011

“Here we go again…” is sung lustily at one post-election event while at another “The party’s over…” draws towards the mournful exhortation to “send in the clowns…” The election designed to bring New Zealand down from the euphoric Rugby World Cup to the realities of living in the early 21^st century has done its job.

Once upon a time we would be offered the chance to vote for “continuation”, “state control” or “prohibition” but that related to alcohol. The election seems to offer us the same choices but now they apply to everything.

And continuation received resounding support with the National Government led by John Key returned with a clear mandate. That is very much what it means for education – a continuation of the key policies that started to get traction for the Government during its first term in office.

The government will continue to seek ways to bring greater focus into the early childhood education area with the intention of increasing access to ECE for some of the communities that currently miss out. This will require a greater emphasis on ECE and a shift of resources that while ostensibly for ECE, are in fact consumed by childcare for those who work. I do not argue that this is not important, simply that it is less important than getting that essential access to two years of quality early childhood education for all students.

At the primary level, teacher unions, principals’ associations and some Boards of Trustees need to seriously question whether they want to continue the battle against National Standards or is it time to get on with meeting the intention of improving reporting on progress in schools and in turn lifting student achievement in primary school education. Goodness knows, we just have to ensure that all students leave primary school with a sound foundation of literacy and numeracy skills. Schools can achieve this for some students, why not for all?

On the way to vote in the election I walked through a primary school area in which there was a row of school gardens. We stopped to look at them. There was a wide range of quality in them. Along came a person who introduced herself as “the garden teacher”. We chatted and I commented that the students might be encouraged to weed the gardens. This led immediately to a too-many-students-only-so-much-time-we-do-our-best response. Same old, same old. Meanwhile the weeds take over some of the gardens and the nourishing plants wilt. Was this a metaphor?

Secondary schools can look forward to a new focus on a secondary version of national standards as part of an emphasis on greater accountability in the secondary school sub-sector. This will not be easy as old arguments will be played out against new ideas. What matters most are the patterns of success and failure, of engagement and disengagement which appear to be so stubborn and concreted in. Time ticks on and change in these patterns is now urgent and sometime soon will shift to crisis. Discussions about raising the age of eligibility for the pension will seem irrelevant in the face of the falls in the standard of living that will be a consequence if we cannot turn the patterns of educational success and engagement around.

It could be that in line with the last couple of EdTalkNZ blogs, some attention will be paid in the next three years to the relationship between the senior secondary school and the postsecondary sector. A clear way forward in addressing the leakage from education is to allow for more flexible and multiple pathways between the conventional curriculum of the school and the opportunities afforded through the postsecondary sector. To more easily achieve this there will need to be some synchronisation of funding approaches between the senior secondary school and the tertiary sector.

New Zealand has the legislative framework in place to allow this to happen. Students in school study postsecondary courses, there can be flexibility in funding, there is a softening of transition points, gradually there develops a little less ownership of young people based on age, more exploitation of the flexibilities of NCEA  but we need to work harder on the application of the qualifications framework across transitions and between senior secondary and tertiary. So much of all this is within our grasp if we could develop an appetite to tackle the issues.

The tertiary sector will be expected to get on with whatever it does but within a fairly constrained budget envelope. Universities and Polytechnics will be expected to lead the innovation charge in complementary ways, research in one supported by technology transfer in the other.

Something could well be done about students fees and allowances. While the current system seems to have support from the ideologues, it is essentially a silly system which creates bad debt on the tertiary education balance sheet of a scale that would not for one minute be tolerated in business. There has to be a better way of getting the money directly to the institution and tying that up with performance measures without cycling the cash through the students.

I expect that the two minister approach – one for schools and another for tertiary – will continue for pragmatic reasons and to avoid conflicts of interest.

Meanwhile the students turn up at school this morning, for tertiary examinations and the NCEA exams continue, schools wind down a bit and it all seems quite remote from the events of the weekend.

Stuart Middleton
EdTalkNZ
22 November 2011

Six days out from the election and the National party unveils its education policy. Labour was out of the blocks a couple of weeks ago. What is remarkable is the focus of both is on skills training. It is clear that both major parties recognise that this is where action must be concentrated. Levels of 15-24 year olds who are not in education or training is, quite simply, unsustainable.

Of course the party in power, National, starts the race with something of an advantage as the policy is very much based on work in progress, plans that have been previously explained and actions of which a first hint has already been given.

The Youth Guarantee policy has developed over the past two years to have multiple prongs to its attack. The extension of the fees-free places for 16 and 17 year olds will reach 12,000 places over the next few years. And while the reduction of qualifications (which had reached a promiscuous 6,000) has continued, within the NCEA  (the national school leaving qualification) the development of vocational pathways in five industry sectors starts the process of bringing more shape into that qualification.

And shape and direction is what both major parties are seeking in their respective policies. For too long we have continued to allow young people to drift through school either failing to collect credits for the NCEA or collecting a set of credits that lack cohesion and integrity.

Other countries, Australia among them, envy the fact that New Zealand has one qualifications framework that should allow different parts of the education system to work together to provide pathways through the different levels and to relate qualifications to each other, to credit work done within one programme into a qualification being pursued in another. But have we exploited that flexibility? No.

Similarly, the achievement-based approach to assessment not only should enable new programmes and different ways of teaching in a variety of settings to meet the needs of increased numbers of students but also actually for the first time give credit where credit is due.  At long last we have the framework of a qualification that ought to mean something, if you have the credit you have been able to demonstrate the learning. But has it? Not really.

Over all of the policies is a gloom of anxiety from the political parties that there is insufficient accountability than there should be. Both seem to feel that there is starting to be some accountability in tertiary programmes but the schooling sector has them all flummoxed. That it is because it is genuinely difficult to come up with a system that is both rigorous and yet at the same time fair. Value added? Raw differentials in performance? Take account of prior experiences and learning? Ignore the differences students bring with them into the school? What sanctions are available when accountability measures identify shortcomings? Very few.

Meanwhile the teacher organisations simply seem to react to every suggestion of increased accountability with the old slogans of the 1970s – give us the resources and we will do the job. 30 years later we are still seeking evidence for such claims.

But there may be things that can be done. The focus on the narrow but critically important skills of literacy and numeracy in the primary school seems justified and if schools struggle with this then they will simply have to focus through narrowing the curriculum or learning how to better embed literacy and numeracy in a rigorous manner into a wider range of activity across the curriculum.

Attendance at school might be a simple measure. Is it too outrageous to suggest that schools should be paid a bonus for reaching targets of school attendance? Of course it is. But being there is a necessary first step to learning. At a secondary level there are real issues when the student body arrives at that level with such a huge range of achievement or lack of it. The result is that in the school sector no-one is accountable for failure.

There is a hint of a suggestion in the National policy that in order to facilitate the development of better pathways for students requires greater alignment between the secondary and the tertiary sector especially between the senior secondary and tertiary.

Good people work in education, they can’t possibly be held totally responsible for the levels of failure and disengagement that all political parties struggle to address. The issues are not because of people – they are structural. The structure of education needs a good shake-up.

Here is an idea. make the primary sector start at Year 1 and end at Year 6. Have a “Junior High School” from Year 7 to Year 10. Then re-position the senior secondary school (Years 11+) as a Senior College within the tertiary sector. This would allow the funding formula for all students from Year 11 on to be synchronised regardless of whether they are in Senior College or a tertiary provider. In fact, the Senior College could well be the tertiary sector (these ideas will be expanded in Thursday’s EdTalkNZ).

You see, a structural solution to a structural problem!

We don’t yet have a political party happy to tackle that. Nor probably an electorate that is open to these ideas for that matter. We can change governments, keep the same governments. But only radical solutions will address the issues they earnestly seek to address in Education.

I vote for change, structural change in Education!            

Stuart Middleton
EdTalkNZ
14 November 2011

I have been intrigued recently at the emergence of a theme in the discussion of TAFE in Australia over recent months. From my perspective it seems to centre on one thing – a quest for esteem for those engaged in TAFE activities.

What is a little troubling is that the esteem is sought in trying to claim the markers of that, that distinguish the university system. Parity in research, degrees, remuneration are all sought in order to achieve a parity of esteem between the TAFE sector, in New Zealand the ITP sector, and the university sector.

Well, of course, trying to pursue this pathway will not work and the time spent would be better directed to the yellow brick road or perhaps the quest for the rosy glow of Shangri La.

The real esteem in ITP education and training is in its intrinsic value and this is enhanced by defining a space within tertiary education for itself, a space that can only be filled by the trades and the kinds of applied education that marks career / trades / vocational education.

Then again, the university sector has become blatantly vocational so that the degree end of ITP sector inevitably has a superficial look of the university about it. A closer and more subtle inspection should show that the ITP sector degrees are not like university degrees at all. But is there a suspicion that they try to be?

In New Zealand we have been working away for the past ten years or so in an effort to develop a “network of provision”, a tertiary sector that is characterised by a set of different kinds of tertiary institution sthat makes a unique contribution to the portfolio of postsecondary education and training.

The ITP sector in New Zealand is largely the domain of Polytechnics and Private Training Providers (PTEs).  But the singing sirens of Lorelei have distracted these providers from time to time. Those sirens have come in the guise of degree teaching and research and just like those women of the Rhine, have lured the providers onto the rocks. The search for parity of esteem is not simply a desire to be the same and where technical and career providers have attempted to pursue a sameness with universities, the result has been rather threatening to the mission of the very provision of the kinds of education and training that mark the ITP providers as being different from the university.

Let’s face it. Those of us who work in the career and technical education end of the system work in the kitchen rather than the lounge. We teach people to do the dirty work. We teach them to do the jobs that you do standing up rather than sitting down. Yes, it is the blue collar end of education. That is why it is so important.

Without the work of the ITP sector, many industries and a good part of the economy would simply grind to a halt as machines and processes broke down, as record keeping and procurement failed to keep pace with the organisation, as supervision and on-the-shop-floor guidance disappeared. It is this middle-earth of business and industry that the graduates of ITP sector inhabit (or should that be inhobitt?).

Of course there are some aspects of government activity that threaten the place of vocational education and training. Those countries that set targets for the proportion of the population that should have degrees are simply creating another form of distraction. There is no persuasive evidence that more people with degrees are needed across the board. The real shortages are in the middle level of qualifications, the technicians, shop-floor supervisors and so on.

This means that ITP sector would be helping itself by urging that qualifications such as the Diploma and why not the Associate Degree, be given greater status. Small the gate might be to get into university but wide open it is for ITP sector. This open access characteristic of ITP sector is one of its strongest features as through this it can help people to become a productive contributor to the community.

The key confusion in the matter calls for a differential approach between university and ITP provision is the extent to which universities have become vocational, largely for marketing reasons. Where once graduate diploma topped students up after the completion of a general degree they have significantly been side-lined by specialist undergraduate degrees.

This means that “vocational” has become not so useful in defining ITP SECTOR work. I like the notion of “linked learning” – learning that links down into the previous educational experiences and successes of students and links upwards and outwards to the world of work. This makes those of us in the ITP sector us in comparison to our university colleagues neither better nor worse, neither more important nor less important and neither more worthy nor less deserving of funding.

We are both blessed with the opportunities that our work opens to us to make a difference.

Stuart Middleton
EdTalkNZ
10 November 2011

At last some education features in the newspaper during the election after all but disappearing during the Rugby World Cup (along with pretty well everything else) and the early weeks of the election. And oh dear, it’s about leaky school buildings, this is certainly a major news item. But I was looking for some connection between and analysis about this news of the leaky buildings (well everyone had known about for a long time) and the “new” spending on schools buildings announced earlier.

The general community has huge issues with leaky homes, crowded out of the limelight currently by leaky ships, earthquakes and game shows such as the Rugby World Cup and the Election. The Education Community also has its leaky home problems estimated to cost about $1.2 billion but we know how these dramas unfold exponentially.

At the same time the great number of schools built in the 1950’s largely of untreated timber (they weren’t expected to have to last very long – just to get us through this baby bump after the War) are now surely at the end of their lives and rebuilding those schools will be a bigger challenge than the leaky ones.

So the inescapable conclusion is that capital expenditure on education will be a major ticket item for any government for a long time to come.

And I haven’t even mentioned tertiary education.

There is an incessant call, and rightly so, for young people to get postsecondary education. Schools are working hard and getting better at bringing students through to the gates to those postsecondary qualifications. But the increased numbers of students have to be accommodated. When the UK announced proudly that it would set a target of 40% of the population gaining a degree, a study showed that in the first instance the country could not afford to house such an increase in the postsecondary numbers nor would they be able to source sufficirent numbers of adequate teaching staff to teach them.

But perhaps there is an easier solution. Most early childhood centres, schools and tertiary institutions are owned by the crown and even though the respectives business models and regulatory relationships with the crown are different, perhaps it is time for some thinking to wrap around the extent to which demand for space could be solved by using vacant space within existing institutions. Rationalisation of schools, primary and secondary, might lead to a considerable amount of space becoming available for both early childhood education and perhaps even for postsecondary education. I know of one polytechnic that is making effective use of a disused primary school. With far less expenditure than might be needed for a new facility, adequate teaching facilities can be created in this way.

Why cannot early childhood programmes be offered out of empty classrooms in priory schools? Age is not a factor – children tend to live with people relatively close to their own age. What is significant about the fifth birthday that requires huge separation of the two groups?

Perhaps underutilised secondary space could be used for tertiary instruction or even a university class. Waikato University started life in a high school.

Let’s find some of that inventive thinking that got New Zealand through previous depressions and wars.

Of course, I can hear you reaching for your pens, keyboards and finger tips (this for the iPad users). There might be a fallacy in all this. The pressure of numbers is perhaps not in the same places as the pressure for space. In a clearly divided community such as we have, half the population lives together and has a low fertility rate while the other half lives together and have a high fertility rate. Education facilities under pressure for space are usually therefore cluster. That is where transport comes in.

The old principle that there are certain distances children can be expected to travel to schools is made a mockery of in communities where phalanxes of military style vehicles deliver children to the gate each morning and wait to ensure that the little ones have the strength to reach the building while in other communities children habitually walk!  One rule cannot be fair to all and perhaps in some communities, schools need to be closer to each other than in other communities.

The old notion of what a school is and where a school should be needs looking at. It is time to consider education centres that meet the needs of all three sectors, that utilise plant to the maximum, that see a flow of people entering for different purposes at different times. It shouldn’t be beyond our wit to devise ways of doing this without compromising safety and without meeting the specialised nature of the educational intervention that a student’s age and progress demands.

The structure of sectors needs rethinking. Does it make sense to build a senior secondary school that is not integrated with tertiary programmes? There is some exciting action planned in this area.

Perhaps it’s time to ask whether every leaky school building needs to be repaired, whether the number of schools we have should be retained, whether the sectors should be made to collaborate to bring about effective use of education buildings. Perhaps it time to ask if we should be structuring education differently. Perhaps it is time…

End note

You all know what muscle memory is – the fact that muscles can learn repetitive action and move ahead of the brain to undertake them. Each time I write “leaky” on the keyboard my fingers desperately seek out the keys for “education pipeline”. Perhaps it is also time…

Stuart Middleton
EdTalkNZ
7 November 2011

I have a number of times recently mused on the extent to which good ideas are ignored only to emerge at some time later in a similar or new shape but essentially repeating or building on those earlier ideas. The same is true of people. I have worked with some of these people.

The multilingual nature of the school population is now at least acknowledged and in many placed even understood. The ways in which this impacts on the curriculum and its delivery in classrooms is now accepted. Indeed major programmes such as the highly effective Kotahitanga professional development programme seeks to help teachers put in place the shibboleth first put forward by Sylvia Ashton-Warner – “take the native imagery of the student and use it for teaching material.” This was also advocated strongly by Bernard Gadd, an English teacher who knew long before the rest of us caught up with it that the world in which we taught English was changing dramatically and irrevocably. Indeed he was to some extent seen as eccentric and a bit of a nuisance as he challenged all-comers about their practice and on occasion their principles.

But without the Sylvia Ashton-Warners, the Bernard Gadds, change would later be much more difficult. We need these people who move ahead and see a world that is beyond our comprehension but of which we slowly develop first a suspicion that they might be right and then an understanding that we missed a chance by not listening more carefully.    

I have also written, repeatedly some of you might say, of the extent to which we failed to grasp the importance of what Phil Capper wrote in 1986 and repeated in 1993. Twenty five years ago he said:

• schools are not catering for the increasingly diverse range of needs the students bring with them into the secondary school;
• the “standard menu” of offerings would no longer be adequate;
• if we didn’t think about the nature of the senior secondary school, there was a danger that other providers would offer pathways that were more attractive and more appropriate;
• we needed to rethink that whole notion of a “school” as having a protected space that gave secondary schools the “right” to claim a group of students of a certain age as “theirs”.

Now I have paraphrased some of this to express the points he made in the current way that these very same issues are being discussed. But in his own words he argued that “schools could respond more readily to what the community wants, especially in the upper secondary school. If schools do not respond to the opportunities and challenges implicit in this, then I believe that we will see a flight of post-compulsory students to other educational institutions and the reduction of all but the most academic schools to virtual junior high schools.” The title of his first paper said it all –“The Jagged Edge.”

This still seems a little dramatic but is it a warning that remains unheeded? Is his later position one which can be ignored? He saw himself “questioning the continued validity of regarding the secondary service as a fixed and discrete entity.”

Phil Capper died last week. Education has lost a thinker who had the courage to raise issues which were uncomfortable to many. In the little area of his activity that I have noted, his thinking was much wider than just this but in the jagged edge material there is a feel of the clairvoyant. We could have saved ourselves and probably many, many students a whole lot of anguish if they had been not only taken notice of but also acted on back then. But perhaps we need these ice-breakers in education, people like Phil Capper, who can break through, who can start to mark a trail that we could follow with profit if only we trusted others insights.

Stuart Middleton
EDTalkNZ
3 November 2011

Sometimes when a character retires from a job, the clichés flow and foremost among them is the phrase “the end of an era”. Occasionally it really is. Last week Karen Sewell was officially farewelled from her position of Secretary of Education and I had the feeling that this was one of those occasions.

Speakers, which included cabinet ministers both past and present, educators, administrators and a cross section of our world, spoke in glowing terms of the quality of the forty-five years of public service that she has given. Of course, forty-five places her a few years ahead of my time in education and that is how it has been.

When I started out as a teacher of English, Karen was already prominent as not only a classroom teacher of extraordinary skill and flair but also as a leader among professionals. As a member of the National English Syllabus Committee (more often than not misnamed as the New English Syllabus Committee), she spread the word about the values of (shock horror) oral English and shaping and moving and viewing and… (enough they cried, ‘tis the end of civilisation as we know it!)

As we gradually crept up the ranks, Karen was always up there ahead of us – HOD English and not afraid of new understandings about the subject and how it might be taught. When the Conference of the International Federation for the Teaching of English was held in New Zealand for the first time in 1990 it was Karen who led the organising committee and was greatly responsible for a conference that was different by being uniquely rooted in the cultures of New Zealand and the Pacific. This was a surprise for those delegates who were looking forward to another gripping discussion on the value of transformational grammar and inclusions / exclusions from the canon of literature!

As a Deputy Principal and a Principal, she continued to show that she was someone who did things differently largely because she was unafraid of difference. I recall Karen was representing someone (was it the PPTA or Principals? I forget) on the Board of Trustees when I was interviewed for and subsequently appointed as Principal of Aorere College. She phoned me later in the day, a thoughtful gesture, and wished me well. Her call finished with sage advice – “enjoy today, it could be the best day in the job!”

I had learnt other lessons from Karen on the fine arts of educational leadership. On one occasion previous to this I had visited her school to see a trainee teacher give a lesson. I commented to Karen that I really liked the plants and the goldfish in her office. “It is always a good idea to have something living in your office other than a fourth form boy!” Later when I shared with her a concern I had with disruptive chatter around the staffroom she cautioned “Never pay attention to grumbling in the corner.”

But it was when Karen went to Wellington that she showed skill and character that would outshine us all. First the Education Review Office. Following Judith Aitken into the role of Chief Review Officer (i.e. CEO) she showed that there really was a role for the ERO that was enabling and empowering, that encouraged teachers and schools in reflective responses to their performance. Under her leadership the ERO grew in stature to have the role that it has today – challenging but without rancour or controversy. I think that through that period, it was the ERO that largely kept alive the notion of a national system while rapid competition swept through most of the rest of it!

Then it was on to the NZQA following a period in the life of that organisation that had been marked by a level of public setback behaviour followed by a timid patch right when it needed decisive leadership. Under Karen that was what it got and she laid the foundations for that organisation to play the critical role that it does in our education system now.

Finally (and where else was there to go?), Karen was appointed Secretary of Education.

Karen’s career to this point has been cumulative. She took the qualities of a great teacher into her leadership roles in the schools sector and she took her grasp of what mattered in classrooms and schools into her distinguished career as a public servant in Wellington. And “public servant” in this case means a lot more than simply being on the state payroll.

Her sense of “public” was of a community that is inclusive – she lived inclusiveness and didn’t simply exhort others to subscribe to it. Her commitment has always been to an education system that served a public regardless of their relative wealth, whatever their aspirations and from wherever they situated. She was never afraid of ideas.

When all the farewell speeches are over, there remains simply only to say, thanks, arohanui and go well but not too far away.

Stuart Middleton
EDTalkNZ
25 October 2011

Just seconds after the referee blew full time in the final of the Rugby World Cup, television showed a brief glimpse of the engraver setting to work on putting the name of the winning team on the William Webb Ellis Trophy – “2011 New Zealand”.

He didn’t engrave “New Zealand (just)” or “New Zealand (by the skin of their teeth)”.  Winning or losing this game of Rugby was a binary matter. Regardless of the winning margin, the team on top was the winner.

There is a long tradition of this binary distinction in education as most awards were either “passed” or “failed”. The size of the winning margin seemed less important than simply passing. Those of us who squeaked through School Certificate back in the pass/fail days were happy with the arrangement. Unknown to us there were of course plenty of people to whom the size of the margin mattered but those were the ones for whom winning in terms of pass/fail was less important than beating others.

Of course there was a downside to this binary business and many a young student had the course of their careers and possibly even lives changed by the odd mark or two assigned by an anonymous examiner. That changed in the mid-1970s when students were given the right to request that they get their marked examination scripts back. This made explicit the odd mistake in marking and, more importantly, brought out into the open the whole business of scaling of results according to a “hierarchy of means” based on a hierarchy of subjects.

This is also reflected in the Rugby World Cup where some teams have to play every 4 or so days while others have longer breaks. It is of course simply a hierarchy of countries based on the seeding process. But unlike other sports that apply a seeding, to base more favourable conditions on those in the top group is a tough ask. In tennis all the seeds play with about the same frequency. Sport is after all meant to be a level playing field as they say.

A less satisfactory sequel coming from the pass/fail mentality of previous examination systems has been the carrying into new ways of working, those old attitudes. New Zealand has in its NCEA school leaving examinations a credit based system in which students accumulate credits at three different levels and with three kinds of award (credit, merit and excellence – the old hierarchical habits linger on).

It is less than helpful to have young people believing that they have “passed” Level 1 or Level 2 when in fact what they have done is to break  through the minimum total of credits required to be awarded recognition at that level. The best students should simply power on to higher and better things.

Worse is the habit of credit harvesting that sees students fixated on the minimum total and without pattern or purpose gathering credits from wherever they can. This leads to sets of “achievement” that lack coherence and integrity and which forms a shaky basis on which to plan for further study. But never mind, they passed!

Of course it takes a long time for myths to be replaced. The old pass/fail system suggested that there were standards, golden standards set for all time. There never was. There was simply a set of mathematical sleight-of-hand procedures that established how many passed.

To think again about the “fails”. I wonder if a trophy like that of the Rugby World Cup should also record the runners-up and the score which might have appeal to some educators who are sometimes shy of a harsh truth. Or perhaps to take a lesson from education where a group of invigilators could meet at the end of the final and announce which was the better team – there’s a novel idea!

Let’s stick with the pass/fail, forget the margins, forget the quality of the play. We scored one more point and we are World Champions.

And just like my School Certificate from 50 years ago, who is going to care about the score!

Stuart Middleton
EdTalkNZ
17 October 2011

The use of choirs brought together and trained by the New Zealand Choral Federation has been one of the best features of the Rugby World Cup. It has brought a touch of class to that part of the introductions to a test match that are usually without class, musically less than primitive and nothing short of a disgrace.

National Anthems and Songs are not any old tunes. They have a history, they carry huge symbolism and are used generally in a formal manner. They are solemn events that formally recognise the sovereign nature of a country.

To roll out minor pop figures to sing an approximation of these wonder tunes and to gargle their way through what they would claim to be an a cappella version of them is to inflict insult on the country in addition to the embarrassment felt by many listeners. And to support these anthems and songs with the full richness of the NZ Symphony Orchestra is just so much better than what we have had before.

What a joy some of those anthems and songs were – first prize to the Argentineans for an anthem that had an instrumental opening that was of symphonic proportions.

During the period of the Rugby World Cup I attended another event that was also a choral feast. But first the story.

Aorere College in Southern Auckland has a long history of excellence on choral music largely under the direction of Terence Maskell. The choirs were, through the 1990s, arguably and consistently right up in the top echelon of school choirs in New Zealand. And frequently inarguably at the top.

But there were few opportunities for students to continue their signing once they had left school. There had been talk about this but nothing eventuated. Students who had toured widely, sung before all kinds of audiences and many prestigious community and political leaders and developed exceptional skill in choral music were left with few options for continuing.

The Graduate Choir NZ was established to provide just that avenue. It was intended for young singers who had graduated from their school or community choir and could not continue their journey toward choral excellence.

The event was the 10^th Anniversary Concert of the Graduate Choir NZ which was a concert of the highest quality music that we have come to expect and get from this choir. A feature of the concert was the premiere of a new Christopher Marshall composition based on capturing a sequence of aural snapshots of Samoan life and culture written for  a double 5-part choir and sung entirely in Samoan. Christopher Marshall has been a pioneer in bringing together the traditions of choral music and those of Samoan culture. This was another wonderful addition to that oeuvre.

Schools are launching-pads for so much that is good – cultural skills, high level music ability, sporting excellence. The grounding that young people get in school is often the trigger for a career or at least a lifetime of enjoyment. Starting young people’s contacts with serious music, with organised sport with other cultural activity is at least as long-lasting and influential in a young person’s life as reading, writing and all that stuff. It is no substitute for those basic skills and indeed real excellence in anything will require those skills to be firmly in place.  

But to inspire young people we have to put the best in front of them. That is why I got excited at the choirs and the world cup. Wonderful renditions rather than the mangling of theses national anthems and songs by pop “wannabes”.  I think it something of a pity that the organisers didn’t quite have enough courage to have continued to use only the choirs right up to the end but at least the soloists who eclipsed the choirs in the last stages were generally worthy.

But excellence it most surely has been.            

Stuart Middleton
EdTalkNZ
13 October 2011

One of my most favourite poems is The Four Quartets by T S Eliot and my most favourite lines in it include these from Little Gidding

What we call the beginning is often the end

And to make an end it to make a beginning

The end is where we start from.

It is axiomatic in education that you can’t make changes unless you know what it is that you want, just where you want it to end. It puzzles me therefore that we simply continue to do what we have always done despite getting the same results. In other words, long past the point of knowing where we will end.

Perhaps the issue is that good ideas for change rely not just on the quality of the ideas but also on the setting into which they are placed. This produces a situation in which we do go around in circles and like a bus load of tourists being driven past yet another cathedral or another monument, we close our eyes and have a snooze.

Take the importance of language in education for instance.

It was in 1928 that George Sampson said in a dissenting opinion to a Royal Commission on Education in England that “every teacher is a teacher of English because every teacher is a teacher in English.” Forty years later, after yet another report from a Commission of Inquiry in England called A Language for Life (The Bullock Report), the idea resurfaced as “language across the curriculum.” The bus of sleeping tourists drove past yet another basilica.

Finally in the early part of this century a huge focus settled on literacy. The bus of tourists had woken up and realised the importance of language in education. All over the show literacy was being embedded, new kinds of literacy were invented, it is the fashion of the moment and so it should be.

But why did we miss earlier opportunities for action in this regard? Despite the ideas being of good quality the setting was wrong. The need for addressing language was not yet sufficiently obvious for us to agree that action was appropriate.

The same thing has happened with the notion of a more porous interface between secondary and tertiary education. At last New Zealand and to a lesser degree Australia is exploring initiatives that blur the distinction between secondary and tertiary education, a distinction that has become a clear barrier to many students who simply do make the crossing. It is now obvious that change is needed.

But that is not to say that the calls for change have not been ignored in the past. Back in 1986, a conference paper for the NZ Post Primary Teachers Association had in it a set of propositions  written by Phil Capper which argued that the hard edge between secondary and tertiary education was unnecessary. He further argued that secondary schools needed to be working alongside other education and training providers and drew attention to the fact that the traditional work of the secondary school was being challenged. Secondary schools, he concluded, needed to change or face the consequences.

Some seven years later in an official NZ Ministry of Education policy paper, Education for the 21^st Century, a view of the future was put forward. In that future students would be able to undertake education and training in more than one setting at the same time and they would be able to combine regular school courses with tertiary courses and workplace training with local industries. This would require agreements between institutions. And just as tertiary institutions would be teaching students that convention said were secondary students, schools would be able to offer polytechnic courses.

Eighteen years later all of this is starting to be given expression. The pattern of circling past a good idea several times before it gets purchase is repeated.

The cynical would say that things have to reach something of a crisis point before people wake up and start looking for the good idea. A more charitable view would argue that there is some truth in the proposition that there is a right time for an idea when a complex combination of factors provide a setting which demands change.

It is as if it takes time for us to develop a clear view of that which we are looking at. T S Eliot was perhaps talking about this process when he concluded his lines about exploration with:

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started from

And know the place for the first time

That last line is important. It is not that the issue is new, what is new is that we have become aware of it. It is only by frank and truthful assessment of what is happening that a setting becomes conducive to change.

Stuart Middleton
EdTalkNZ
5 October 2011

Teachers in schools are trained, registered and paid to attend to student achievement. Principals, middle managers and anyone with responsibility in a school is expected to know a little more about student achievement than those without it. School Boards have a responsibility to oversee student achievement in the school. In addition to this there is a plethora of assistance available to schools by professional development, tertiary education  specialists, private consultants and suchlike – that can provide further assistance and add to this focus on student achievement in schools.

And yet we learn that 30 “Student Achievement Practitioners”  have been appointed at  salaries in excess of $100,000 to provide advice assurance to schools.

The question has to be asked – why is this necessary when we have Principals, middle managers and trained and qualified teachers all of whom can be expected to have specialist knowledge in and of – guess what? – student achievement?

Well the answer to that is clear. We have a problem with student achievement in this country. Students are not achieving to satisfactory levels in sufficient numbers. Why?

Lets discard the popular opinion loved by those who call talkback radio that teachers are incompetent. There is not a shred of evidence that this is true. The same systems of teacher preparation, professional development, leadership and delivery that produce this worrying level of student failure also produces the best students in the world.

Lets also put to one side any suggestion that principals do not know what they are doing. There are issues of balancing the demands of being an administrative, professional and instructional leader and it is likely that there will be some struggle to be effective in all three to the same degree. But there are many opportunities for principals to get support should they need it. There are even I believe a group of “Senior Advisors” available to schools to support the principal and board.

I am left concluding that the issue with student achievement in New Zealand boils down to one thing – too many schools and too many teachers encouraged by too many principals are simply doing the wrong thing. They are working with diligence, flair and competence  but they are not hitting the target.

If ever the statement “less is more” had meaning it is surely when it is applied to schooling.  The demands made on schools is simply to do too much about too many things. There once was an expectation that schools had done their job when a relatively restricted range of objectives had been met.  Prime among these were at primary school the foundation skills of reading and writing and mathematics now perhaps usefully called literacy and numeracy. Where schools fail to bring students up to good and agreed standards in these areas they have failed regardless of whatever else they do.

Developing in students a sense of their history and their culture is also useful. Above all, exciting young people about learning and also doing these things – literacy, numeracy and a sense of who they are – is the hallmark of a good school where the talents and training of teachers is being directed towards positive outcome.

At the secondary school the single most important purpose is to build on these basic skills and prepare them for whatever is to follow – university, trades, employment, citizenship and so on. Sports and other activity such as school balls are nice to have, but never have in themselves a sufficient goal of schooling.

At a UC Berkeley football match I went to a couple of years ago they had a parade of the university’s sports teams. Mid-parade the stadium announcer solemnly advised the 80,000 people present that “no sports person is parading tonight who has not maintained an academic grade point average of 3.5.” In other words, make no mistake about it, learning comes first.

How do we reconcile the brilliant annual Polyfest in Auckland each year with its outstanding display of Maori and Pasifika performance with the grim statistics of Maori and Pasifika educational attainment in those very same schools?

If ever there was need for a group with the grunt of a Royal Commission or a Review it is now. We have to get back to making effective use of the skills of our teachers before we are overwhelmed by the issues of achievement. We need to reinvent the primary school and the secondary school and give fresh primacy to learning in every classroom.

Without fundamental and widespread change, Student Achievement Practitioners will be just one more attempt.

Imagine the concept being translated into the health sector. Patient Healing Practitioners would be a notion that would struggle to get traction.

Having said all of the above I was greatly unimpressed by the attack on the SAPs by the leaders of the primary principals organisation who went for a blatant ad hominen attack.  He was mighty lucky that no journalist thought to ask “Why do we need SAPS in schools?”

 Today’s guest writer is Karl Mutch, Manager, Team Solutions, at The University of Auckland’s Faculty of Education.

When I was a young boy in the 1960s, a long time before computer games and even before space invaders, there used to be things called puzzle books which children would inevitably receive as Christmas or birthday presents. These books, usually an inch thick and printed on poor quality paper, were useful for amusing ourselves on a wet weekend or in the winter school holidays. They contained pictures you could colour in, quizzes, crosswords, lists of interesting facts and, my favourite, join the dots. Using a pencil, you would begin to join up the hundreds of apparently random dots on a page until some kind of shape emerged – if I remember correctly it was usually an elephant, a cute dog, a palm tree or a clown. The easier join the dot pages even had some of the picture already provided so you kind of knew what was coming. Even if you could anticipate the final image, there was something satisfying about completing the picture, joining up all the dots and seeing everything connected.

What would it look like if we could join up some of the dots to help connect schools more strongly with our communities? What would a truly community connected school look like, and feel like – for students, for teachers, for school leaders and for members of the community? What sort of picture might emerge?

A couple of months ago I sat in the main auditorium at the Telstra Clear Events Centre in Manukau with over 200 people who were asking a similar question. What was exciting about this was not just the name – Raise Pasifika Fono – but the fact that it was a rare attempt to connect the education dots across a large and diverse community – to improve outcomes for Pacific students. There were specialist groups – students, early childhood, primary and secondary teachers, principals, tertiary educators, government ministry people, business people, church representatives, some MPs, union representatives, health sector representatives, counsellors, local community members, parents and people from local government. At times, we talked within our specialist groups, at times we re-grouped to engage with a range of perspectives. For a moment, it felt like a whole community coming together to talk about education connections and how these might be aligned to benefit students.

Of course there are already numerous examples of schools, kura and communities working together to benefit students – iwi have created and are implementing education plans and exploring education partnerships; parents are involved in school reading and homework programmes; businesses and sports clubs provide mentoring, work experience or sponsorship. Local councils have community development programmes and community trusts fund a wide range of school-connected projects. There are youth workers in schools and programmes that connect schools with artists and scientists. Trades academies allow secondary schools to engage in new ways with employers and tertiary institutes. Somewhere amongst all of this is the potential for more coherence in how schools and communities connect – perhaps across a suburb, town or region – and I haven’t even touched on the potential of virtual communities to revolutionize the ways schools ‘connect’.

Government can play a role. There are increasing connections between iwi and the Ministry of Education through iwi education partnerships. This week, Child, Youth and Family has established a direct hotline for teachers to help encourage reporting of suspected child abuse. Although there are worries there may not be enough staff at CYF to follow up those concerns effectively, it is at least an example of a direct connection between schools and a government agency that could make a difference for children. Why wasn’t it done years ago? What other hotlines do we need?

How can local government increasingly play a role here? It could start by providing more infrastructure for agencies and organisations to make connections. This would ensure that agencies intersecting and participating in education would know who was playing what role or delivering which services. It would allow the community to access the information they need in a timely way. In Auckland, the Education Summit held earlier this year was an attempt to kick start that process.

I know that community means different things to different people, but exploring ways for schools to connect in increasingly innovative and coherent ways with their communities seems like a really important job. What sort of picture, what sort of vision, might emerge if we actually start joining up more of those dots?

Dave Guerin, CEO/Education Strategist for Education Directions, is today’s guest writer.

The OECD’s Education at a Glance publication kicks off a global rush each year to find the statistics that best prove your previous beliefs. Last week’s release was no exception.

In a perfect educational world, we would all have a deep understanding of our own and other educational systems. In reality, even those who are sector leaders or journalists are often too busy (or can’t be bothered) to go beyond the surface of things. So when a shiny set of comparative statistics comes out, it is far too easy to cherry-pick a few to make your case about how the world should be.

In New Zealand, the story about the OECD figures was that our public tertiary education fees were the seventh highest in the world. That does seem to be true but if you go to the relevant section of the 2011 Education at a Glance, you will find that:

• only 23 countries were listed in the chart on p.258, so we’re 7/23;
• the note to the chart says “This chart does not take into account grants, subsidies or loans that partially or fully offset the student’s tuition fees.”;
• another chart on p.256 shows that New Zealand is fourth highest in the world (4/18) for the proportion of students benefitting from public loans, scholarships or grants;
• a chart on p.269 shows that we spend the highest proportion of tertiary education spending of any of the nations listed on student loans (1/19);  and
• text on p.257 states that NZ has one of the highest rates of access in the world.

My reading of all that is that we have high fees, but these are offset by near universal access to student loans, which are in turn subsidised greatly to reduce their real cost, meaning that access to tertiary education remains very open. In short, the real price of New Zealand tertiary education is low enough to let lots of people study.

My research might seem like a lot of trouble, but it only took 20 minutes on a rainy afternoon to write this whole piece. Of course, if you can’t be bothered with that, you could take the approach of Universities UK. In a two paragraph media release, UUK didn’t even bother citing a statistic – they just inserted the OECD’s name into their narrative about the need of higher spending.

Dave Guerin

Colleen Young, Administrator of the Centre for Studies in Multiple Pathways is today’s guest writer.

Years ago, when attending teacher professional development sessions, the topic of student outcomes was rarely discussed. During the late 1970s and through to the mid 1980s, the majority of students either progressed to tertiary educational institutions, went straight into an apprenticeship, or found low-skilled work. 

These days, while New Zealand continues to educate our youth with the “one-size-fits-all” education system, and while there continues to be an increasing number of students remaining in our senior secondary school with no intention of progressing to university, more questions need to be asked around the notion of student success.  For example, we know that every student requires a certain standard of numeracy and literacy to be able to work in the current and future workplace.  We know that critical thinking and problem solving skills are paramount learning tools which assist students in becoming successful in their future. We know that the creation of multiple learning pathways makes sense for a large group of students who will not attend our universities – so what are we doing to encourage this group of students to improve their success?  Does student success have to be all about passing the three sciences, English and maths?

I would argue that it doesn’t.  Student success can be, and should be, determined by student interests and what is best for the student, so they can progress to each next step until they reach a successful career outcome suited to them.  Once a student has an opportunity to “try before he/she buys” student success ought to follow. In other words, when a student finds a course that they can be passionate about, usually they are more engaged in the learning process and success follows. But how does one know what they want to do if they have no idea what that task feels like to do, how long it takes and where the task leads to further down the track? 

The School of Secondary Tertiary Studies (Tertiary High School) is one such form of schooling which allows its students to try different courses at the Manukau Institute of Technology, while also studying for their senior schooling NCEA Levels 1, 2 or 3 at the same time.  Effectively that means that if a student doesn’t like fabrication after six weeks, they can try catering and hospitality or early childhood and so on.  Some of them may even be fortunate enough to like several courses and they end up having to make a choice! The point is that instead of students doing bits and pieces of tertiary courses while still at secondary school, it makes more sense to enable students to try different courses of interest to them whilst demonstrating the need for numeracy and literacy for any future career they may take. I should point out that some secondary schools are already actively doing this.  However, for students to become successful citizens, it is also important for schools to provide accurate and useful careers advice, student social support and extra academic support if required.  

It is commendable to see the Ministry of Education continuing to promote and implement the Youth Guarantee Scheme alongside Trades Academies and Service Academies in New Zealand. For youth searching for alternative educational pathways other than university, these new courses provide a range of opportunities for students at risk of disengaging and dropping out of school.  

Let’s continue to create rigorous and challenging pathways that re-engage our youth, challenge the “status quo” for senior secondary school students who do not wish to go to university and watch our student failure rates fall. Students want to succeed.  Therefore, it is up to us as politicians, educators and policy makers in New Zealand to listen to the students needs, make decisions to reallocate funding streams at the senior schooling level to provide greater student choice,  so all students now, and in the future will learn what it feels like to experience student success.

Colleen Young

Stuart Middleton
EdTalkNZ
29 August 2011

There is a lot of talk currently about the importance of job creation if economies are to position themselves to grow out of the recessionary murk that pervades. But a lot of this obsession misses the point.

Education creates jobs. Jobs won’t create education and the benefits that go with them. So the focus only on a so-called “pipeline” that has jobs at the end of it misses the point. There is another pipeline that matters more – education.

The reason that so many young people are unemployed is not solely because the number of jobs has decreased but significantly more so because so many young people are unemployable. Even if the jobs appeared overnight the impact on the great pile of unfulfilled potential would be slight. The creation of youth employment rates would similarly put a few into work but they would not make the unemployable ready for work.

Years ago, the Manukau City Council, in a move rare among territorial authorities at the time, wrote an economic development strategy. It then was obvious that alongside that there was a need for an employment strategy. Having completed that, it was clear that the final piece of the jigsaw puzzle of a well-educated and knowledgeable community was an education strategy. Education begets employment begets economic growth.

It is no coincidence that Silicon Valley grew around Stanford University –indeed it got its start on Stanford land and with a great push from the Stanford Research Centre, established to give impetus to economic development after the Second World War. (Stanford University could also benefit from the income from land it couldn’t sell!) People like David Packard and Bill Hewlett weren’t recruited through an employment programme and subsequently turned out to be quite good – they were proven graduate students invited to pursue their work in the Stanford area. Education leads to job creation which leads to economic growth.

Some of the mythology around Bill Gates talks of how he “dropped out” of Harvard. Burst through the top would be more accurate than drop out of the bottom. He was greatly successful at every step of his education, well supported by his parents and got a great start at his exclusive primary school. He got opportunities to explore computers both in school and through parental connections in private companies; he produced the computer programme for scheduling classes at his school; in his sophomore year at Harvard the development of new computers presented him with what he saw as an opportunity to set up a company which he did with his parents’ support and approval. Educational “dropout”? Not for a moment. Education leads to job creation which leads to economic growth.

If there is a challenge in terms of economic growth in New Zealand and Australia it is the challenge of so many young people who at the point of completing their basic schooling do not have the skills to continue with an education that would make them employable. Once upon a time there were opportunities for such youngsters – low skilled and unskilled employment offered a chance to them to get a foot in the door and on the ladder. But that has dried up. Once upon a time a benign employer would give a raw kid a chance and that often turned out well. But that has dried up.

The young person who has the skills of employability – team work, communication, leadership, time management, creative thinking, striving for excellence – and can back these up with good literacy, numeracy and digital skills will be likely to be able to successfully seek employment. More so, if they have completed an educational programme in disciplines relevant to the field in which they are looking and can clearly demonstrate a few personal skills of energy, commitment, enthusiasm and good verbal skills. It probably helps not to have bits of wire stuck through odd places and tats on the forehead. None of that seems too hard and those who successfully complete their schooling and a postsecondary qualification will generally measure up.

We need a steady supply of such young people into the labour force at all levels so that those ahead of them can create the new jobs. Growth comes from such leadership and will never be created simply by wishing it could be. It is not the new recruit who will produce growth, they simply make it possible for the experienced and the developers and the entrepreneurs to do so.

Therefore is it pointless becoming paralysed by the clichés? We need to prepare people for jobs which don’t yet exist – what about preparing them for the ones that do? Everyone will have seven careers in a lifetime – what about getting them ready for the first one? We need new kinds of integrated skills – it helps to have skills that can be integrated. Growth happens because successful and highly educated professionals pull disciplines and activity in new directions creating new opportunities for those coming in. Businesses expand because they can do so with some confidence that there is a skilled workforce able to support the growth.

Economic growth is reliant on our creating more people who instead of taking from the public purse are able to contribute to it. And that requires high level educational success for all. Education creates jobs. When education fails, it only creates jobs in education. Education outcomes trump labour market outcomes every time!

Stuart Middleton
EdTalkNZ
25 August 2011

The first three letters to the editor in my newspaper yesterday were about education – Teach First New Zealand, Don Brash’s “let the successful schools set up franchises and National Standards.” They were all against what they wrote about which seems to be the prevailing mood in education discussions these days. Everyone seems to know what they don’t like, won’t have and can’t tolerate. You get very little sense of a positive contribution based on what they would support, will have and can believe in.

I think it too simplistic to say that all this is simply the mood of the change averse. Teaching is too hard and education too difficult an environment unless you have resilience that, it seems to me, has at its heart not only in understanding that change happens but also a commitment to making it happen. So what is behind all this?

The notion that there can only be one track into teaching and that is through the conventional pre-service or postgraduate teacher education programmes has never been true. Teachers have come into teaching without that track for a good part of the history of education systems, have come into teaching with little or no qualifications at different times, have come in as pupil teachers at other times – there has not always been this one way that has developed especially in the last thirty years.

In 1980 I wrote with a colleague a proposal for a different kind of teacher education programme based in the secondary school, supported by the teachers college through a short preparation, block courses etc. It had all the components of a professional teacher education but was located in a different place. This was in response to the view held strongly at that time in the developing of multicultural schools that the colleges were not meeting their needs. The proposal was read with politeness and shelved.

So it is not new to think that there might be a different way and Teach First New Zealand might well be that way. It is to happen in the controlled and professional environment of the school so school students will not be at risk. If it attracts more quality young graduates into teaching then it will be a good thing. That it is supported by the Faculty of Education at the University of Auckland suggests to me that the quality will be sound.

Now the franchise idea. There is a franchise of Catholic schools operating in New Zealand, one of certain private schools – this might be an idea that has some merit. There is certainly a logic in the centralised administration of a franchise that says that resources might be more effectively used and various functions might well be managed better. But is it the solution to lift schools of moderate performance and would all students under such an approach benefit? Who knows?

The experience in other countries of highly “successful” schools taking over “failing” schools is mixed but there are examples where the one kind of school has informed improvement in the other. What accounts for these dramatic changes? In North Caroline USA, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools has responded to the national call to close failing schools down or to hand them over to outside expert organisations to fix and instead is linking schools and swapping staff and seeing marked changes. Now Brash went much further than this and I wonder what frightens us. If we have got it right with our current model then such an experiment would not have impact. On the other hand, what if it worked? I remain doubtful. But it is better to both promote and reject ideas through argument rather than blind faith.

Finally, the old chestnut of National Standards – I still wait to hear from the education community, a new argument based on a better idea. If educators are not going to come up with one then the field is wide open for anyone to have go. Letters to editors that say that schools are already doing it and much more, seem to me to support the idea rather than reject it. Why isn’t the case against National Standards put succinctly, in plain language and based on evidence? That is after all what the National Standards is seeking in reporting to parents.

All three letters are essentially about topics that coalesce into one – a desperate search for solutions to what is seen as the intractable issue of failure in education – failing to get the right people into teaching, replacing failing schools by replicating schools perceived to be successful schools and addressing issues of students who fail.

Letters to the Editor are an interesting read. I acknowledge that they are selected and I know who does the selecting and wonder about that – they are certainly not a reflective slice of opinion. But why are they too often simply a rejection of an idea rather than a contribution to a discussion?

PS:  I acknowledge that the writers of the letters might not be teachers or have any specialist knowledge of education but that is another issue and a challenge that faces us.

Stuart Middleton
EdTalkNZ
22  August 2012

It’s funny how you can be busily engaged in something at home and yet you can smell the pot starting to burn on the stove. You only hope that it is not too late and that neither the veges or the pot are beyond retrieval.

I instinctively feel that I can smell an educational pot starting to burn – the issue of youth unemployment, youth disengagement from school and teenage parents.

Increasingly you read reports and studies that have titles such as The Silent Epidemic and The Forgotten Half. Such titles capture pretty well the nature of this building crisis. It is reaching proportions where half of youth between 15 and 24 years are caught up in youth unemployment and/ or disengagement and it has crept up on us. This is at least worrying and at worst disastrous.

In twenty or so years time this considerable part of a generation will be aged between 35 and 44 years old, be parents, and be a critical segment of a New Zealand economy. Can we maintain our standard of living if this group has little potential to create wealth? Can we expect their children to succeed where they have failed? Can we expect this large group not to be a charge against the state?

I have written plenty about disengagement and policies such as the current Youth Guarantee set of initiatives that will help. But more fundamental changes are required in our schools. Multiple pathways through which young people have a range of options that lead them through to university and polytechnics, through to real qualifications that will ease their entry into the workforce, bring incomes (both to them through wages and to us through the tax they pay) and provide them with the wherewithal to support their families well through education.

So we need to keep on working on those areas but with greater urgency, wider reach and more marked impact.

I read in the newspapers that the Irish are to supply some of the labour required for the reconstruction of Christchurch. I can accept that we could be short on middle level experience – just as a basketball coach cannot teach height, an education provider cannot teach experience. But when it comes to raw grunt that is qualified to entry level, those jobs should go to New Zealanders and young New Zealanders at that.

This might require the Government to create jobs. But we are dealing with crisis here, both in post-quake Christchurch and in the slowly awakening education community. It would be my guess that we could easily train 5,000 young people to enter the workforce in Christchurch to work under supervision within 6 months and to maintain a supply after that. We did it after World War II, why not again now? Polytechnics could be challenged to meet these deadlines and to put into place an ongoing training capability in Christchurch. What about reinventing the “night school”? Drawing a workforce for Christchurch from across the youth of New Zealand has the advantage of returning qualified and experienced workers to many parts of New Zealand when the task is done.

What a golden opportunity we could make out of the unfortunate events. Construction, infrastructure, plumbing, painting, concrete workers, structural engineers and many more – we are here presented with real work to put alongside real training and real qualifications.

I can imagine that all this would not be greeted with joy by those managing the construction contracts but surely some additional support could be given to them to get this major training endeavour under way.

It is said that the needs of Christchurch in terms of rebuilding will take 10 or more years to complete so the timeframes here could change a whole generation and be the step change required if we are to return to an education system that will set most young people off on the pathways to prosperity. An approach like this could take the shape of a NZ Trades Corp.

Teen parents also require a special effort. There are it seems 28,000 young parents who were they not young parents, would be included in the statistics for NEETS (those not in employment, education or training). It seems crazy to simply accept that this group should be inactive (granted there is the not underestimated activity of parenthood) and special programs could easily be put into place for them surely. The great success over many years of units for teen mums would encourage us to set our sights high for the larger group.

There is an urgency about our seeking responses to the unsustainable size of the half of our young people who are dropping out of education and training and possibly out of sight. Bill Gates used to say that we should do something about all this because it is hurting them. He now says we should do something because it is hurting us!

Do I smell a pot burning or is it Rome?

Stuart Middleton
EdTalkNZ
15 August 2011

Years ago I bought some land that had a lot of gorse on it. Some of it was huge with trunks 5”-6” in diameter. I sprayed it and burned it and it came back. I slashed it and burned it and it came back. In the end I realised that if I didn’t get the roots I was doomed to an inevitable defeat at the hand of this prickly nuisance.

Cutting off the growth above the ground and pouring a little creosote on the exposed stump did the trick. The next year I was able to walk around and pull by hand the stumps out of the ground. It never came back.

I think that this is a parable that governments might wish to heed when addressing the issues of youth benefit dependency. The announcement that youths on benefits are to have their control of money withdrawn could be a good thing and it could be a bad thing.

If it is simply slash and cut and burn it is doomed to fail. If it is the start of a careful system of tracking and monitoring and intervention such as those in Scandanavia then it could be a good thing.

Think Lisbeth Salander in Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Of course Nils Bjurman was a bad bastard in every way, but the Scandinavians have careful tracking and monitoring and supervision systems and placing someone under complete supervision with control over their money is the most severe intervention. But that level of intervention doesn’t sit there on its own. All Scandinavian young people are tracked and supervised in an attempt to ensure positive outcomes and there is a series of graduated interventions before the complete “ward of state” response.

A recent report from Sweden details the concern because truancy rates in some areas are approaching 2% – we dream of reducing ours to that! Young people have options in education and training. Someone is responsible for educational failure, someone has the job of tracking students to minimise failure and negative outcomes.

It should also be pointed out that to promote an intervention with only this group ignores that there is in operation a pipeline that effectively delivers many more failing young people to that NEETS group. Even if the announced intervention works very well, it will not make a difference as many more youths take their place – without a balanced set of interventions I see a bureaucratic backlog growing at great expense.

What is needed is a complete package and the government has made a good start with this. The Youth Guarantee package is starting to show signs of being a comprehensive set of interventions and new ways of working. It will lead to multiple pathways for young people that will lead them to increased success in education and training, will lead them to qualifications and finally lead them to employment. Trades academies, service academies, fees free places in tertiary, vocational pathways, tracking and monitoring students and effective careers advice and guidance – this is where resources should be directed.

Dealing with the very group that has been targeted in this announcement requires attention to the three dots – access to early childhood education, successfully attaining NCEA Level 2 (and that is the biggest challenge in all this and requires a huge rethink on the part of primary and secondary schools) and the successful attaining of a postsecondary qualification.

The youths on benefits have been created by the failure to address these three issues and by our watching increased levels of behaviour develop that lead to unprecedented levels of dropping out of a positive future. When statistics that point to a creeping upwards of various participation figures are trotted out, they simply fail to acknowledge that we are seeing the development of unprecedented failure among young people.

The recent New Zealand Institute report, Fewer Snakes, More Ladders, is clear – “there are no signs of trends for improvement”.

It is good to see action but tinkering with the major issue of our time will not cut it, just as I did not get a result with the gorse when I tried naively to cut it.

Young people on benefits are a symptom, they are the part of the gorse bush that is above the ground. It is no good dealing to that which is highly visible without also paying attention to that which is hidden but is the root cause.

Stuart Middleton
EdTalkNZ
8 August 2011

The world of education is a funny place. It remains one of the last bastions of the struggle between the classes only in this instance it is the struggle between academic and vocational.

In Canberra a decision has been made to merge, amalgamate, bring together – what ever word you choose – the University of Canberra and the Canberra Institute of Technology, a TAFE institution. This was recommended by the Bradley of The Bradley Report fame and such a recommendation is entirely within the framework of that report.

But immediately it was announced the discussion attracted the rather inevitable headline – Planned merger of uni, TAFE unwelcome! (The Australian, 5 August 2011). The ration packs were broken out to ready the troops on both sides for the scrap that inevitably lies ahead.

Such announcements mean that some will be winners and some will be losers. And whatever word you do choose to describe this process (which was something of an Australian sport in the late 1980s), there will be a major partner (which wins) and a minor partner (which loses more than it wins).

So what decides the winner/loser designation? It is not size or even quality and especially not the needs of the community – no it all still boils down to good old fashioned status. Education has never managed to develop any sort of willingness to understand or practise parity of esteem. And we all know what that means!

This state of affairs is fuelled by a strange belief that there is a difference between “academic” and “vocational”. Thinking about this distinction for a second or two exposes it for the hogwash that it is. What is more vocational than becoming a medical doctor, a lawyer, or an engineer? What is more academic than becoming an electrician, or a builder or a jewellery maker? All the old distinctions attributed to those two words and the pretentious behaviour they spawn no longer apply.

Yet still the immediate reaction to the suggested amalgamation sees the university Vice Chancellor assuring people that the university would seek to establish a polytechnic as a teaching-only institution for higher vocational qualifications. This was to be a “tri-sector” institution whatever that might be.

On the other hand, Dr Wheelahan, a specialist vocational education specialist, was adopting a defensive stance – it makes sense she claims but she is suspicious about a university takeover – it might not be a “marriage of equals” she fears. Is an institutional merger ever a “marriage of equals”?

It all boils down to the love affair of western education systems with the baccalaureate – status really is a matter of degree or in this case, degrees. Australia is one of those countries (others are the USA and the UK) which believe that goals which establish percentage target for students getting degrees will be the educational action that leads them to the promised land.

Apart from the fact that the countries haven’t much hope in meeting the targets they set (most young people who are qualified to go to university actually get there and the universities have seemed unable over a very long time to lift their successful completion rates), it is not increased numbers of degrees that we need but greatly increased numbers of young people with technical skills and older people with new technical skills.

This is exactly what a vocational institution does, it is why TAFE systems exist. Bringing together the two kinds of institutions – the university that would brand itself as academic and the TAFE institution that would be comfortable with its vocational reputation is an opportunity for rethinking the relationship between the two. It is a chance to think more carefully about the academic dimensions of vocational programmes and the vocational nature of academic programmes.

Instead I predict that both sides of the amalgamation will set out to “protect” the “very special and different” approach that they take to their work. We know that amalgamations do not save money despite financial gains being listed high among the reasons for them more often than not. We know that amalgamations can be managed so as to allow the same old ways of [1] working to continue, most of them have proved just that.

What would be exciting would be for Canberra folk to get together to craft a new approach based on multiple pathways that make opaque the hard distinctions between academic and vocational and offer flexible and linked pathways for students who would have options a little more subtle than pass or fail.

I have always enjoyed the description by Knight and O’Neill in a contribution about amalgamations in Wollongong to a study of mergers in that orgy of getting together in the late 1980s in Australia. They give a hint in the title which is “Mating and Amalgamation” I think they get it right.

Consider the position of some of the then threatened parties, particularly those universities and colleges which were to merge. The cliff edge is no place to indulge in philosophic discourse nor for romantic exploration. There were certain doctrinal problems, for university-college conjunctions amount to what used to be called mixed marriages. Such cross-sectoral mergers contradicted the rhetoric of those government agencies who for years had maintained that one party was refined and academical and the other (no less equal of course) was practical and responsive to needs. Universities might have seen themselves in the former garb but colleges actually came to believe their place was at the kitchen and laundry end of the tertiary abode. In short, it was generally supposed that college/university partnerships were a mis-match and to be opposed by both sides. The universities feared a pollution, the college a subjugation. In uppity circles the University of Wollongong was spoken of as if it were the Whore of Babylon for accepting the local college. As we know from Revelations (17:3), that lady sat upon a scarlet beast having seven heads and ten horns – not a bad description of the academic structure in many a combined institution.

Stuart Middleton
EdTalkNZ
4 August 2011

One of the exciting and challenging ways in which New Zealand has changed over the past forty years has been the explosive flowering of linguistic diversity in our communities. Where once English was heard pretty well everywhere, at least in public, and those other languages were confined to the homes, the churches and the places in which those who shared languages other then English got together, now on the streets and in our daily lives we hear a rich symphony of many languages.

This change has been an uneasy one for New Zealand and from time to time various people have put forward the view that if only everyone spoke English we would all become a happy band of homogenous New Zealanders. Such a view is both delightfully innocent and dangerously ignorant.

When a native speaker of a language other than English learns English they do not become an Englishman or woman – they remain a Samoan, a Sikh, a Somali and so on. But they now have two languages in which they can be Samoan, Sikh and Somali citizen. It could be that in fact that these new skills allow for a confidence that intensifies the feeling of identity.

Where these languages are new to the English-speaking community, they add richness and it is the community that now has  new skills and capabilities. But do we respond positively to this? 

Not always. It is a tired old joke that has more than a grain of truth in it that if you speak two languages you are bilingual, if you speak many languages you are multilingual and if you speak one language you are English. Language learning has never been a strength of English communities so we struggle with linguistic diversity. We struggle to find comfort with indigenous languages in English speaking countries and we continue to believe that if you are going to be a valuable citizen you had better measure up in gems of English language.

Take for instance those professions that stamp arbitrary English language requirements on students and new citizens from language communities other than English. Nursing is one such example. If you arrive in New Zealand as a trained and experienced nurse you cannot offer your skills in nursing for the service of your new community until you have demonstrated a level of skill in English. Well is it more a case that you have to demonstrate the skill of passing an examination in English rather than actual communication. And you have to do this in an examination that a sizeable number of New Zealand English-speaking people would fail – not that they will be stopped from practicing. We simply assume that if by accident of birth you are English-speaking you will be OK. Of course the programs and tests and examinations that you have to pass are evidence of a certain level but it cannot be assumed that it is the level that we require of people from other language communities.

Why are we able to communicate with babies and toddlers easily and yet assume that adults require degree level English in order to communicate with us?

One of the explanations of levels of educational success (or more accurately, failure) for indigenous communities is the extent to which we have removed the first language and expected them to proceed on the basis of a second language. I suspect that this helps explain Maori student educational patterns over a hundred years and that of Pasifika students more recently.

Where students retain a robust first language that they to continue to develop and grow, they are able to learn a new language easily. Metalinguistic processes enable them to learn that new language by reference to their first language -in what ways is this new language the same as or different from the language I already know?

In Sweden, when a student from a particular language community enrols in an institution, that institution is required to find and employ a native speaker from that language community to support the student. This is very enlightened. We could do this easily as we have a rich vein of community members available who would be pleased to be employed in this way. Yes there is a cost but the cost of making education difficult for those who do not bring the correct language into the classroom is much greater.

I strolled down Queen Street in Auckland recently and noticed the rich range of languages I was hearing around me. Perhaps they were all tourists or students from English language schools. But I do hope that they were not. We are the all the richer for having a community characterised by linguistic diversity.

It is one of the great ironies of the modern world that in California, part of the country of E pluribus unum, half of the population cannot speak to the other half. The rift of monocultural obsessions is now complete.

Stuart Middleton
EdTalkNZ
1 August 2011
 

It has been the mid-year, between semester break for education institutions – even EdTalkNZ had a wee rest!. But it is not that educators get a break really and the conference season has been in full swing.

I get a sense that a mood for change is developing.

New Zealand has moved ahead of other English speaking countries in putting together the pieces of the educational jigsaw that will allow for new approaches to be made in tackling the issues of disengagement and the development of more effective pathways between secondary school and further and higher education.

Those jigsaw pieces are the development of a policy setting that allows for flexibility, the existence of a legislative framework, the solution of cross-sector funding arrangements and the development of new and innovative programmes.

Two conferences held in the break have driven home the points that the educational environment in New Zealand needs to change and that there is no longer any excuse not to change.

New Zealand and Australia share a pretty grim set of statistics of failure, of disengagement, and of poor performance by priority learner groups (i.e. indigenous groups, migrant groups, students with special needs). It is clear that continued tinkering with the current education system cannot lead to the changes which improve results nor can it result in changes that are achieved quickly enough to beat the speed of the demographic changes.

The first conference brought together a wide group of educators involved in working across the interface of secondary and tertiary – secondary/tertiary programmes, trades academies, service academies and mentoring schemes. It was exciting to learn of changes happening in small ways, to hear of results being that thrilled and offered new hope for many students.

It was even more exciting to see the energy that was being brought to the challenges of providing new and multiple pathways that reach out to students and led them into higher level programmes and qualifications. It was the view of one international speaker that something very special was happening.

The conference was put together by the Centre for Studies in Multiple Pathways at Manukau Institute of Technology, the site of New Zealand’s first Tertiary High School – a radical new programme that integrates the school qualifications (NCEA) with postsecondary career and technical qualifications. It has reported some encouraging results after its first year of operation especially in the performance of Maori and Pasifika students.

This was of particular interest to the second conference that brought together a wide range of educators engaged in different endeavours in the field of Maori education. Again the focus was on pathways and pipelines and the need to promote pro-active interventions in both if we are to lift the performance of Maori and Pasifika students – something we simply cannot afford not to do.

A project reported to the conference has seen the development of a web-based tool for Maori students to design and to identify pathways into programmers that already exist. We know that the provision of accurate and detailed information is central to intelligent career advice and guidance and this is a great start.

What has been exciting is that both conferences were evidence of action that encourages us to believe that there is a hope developing that by working differently we really can get different results. As the title of a major report released by the NZ Institute in the past fortnight said – we need “more ladders” and “fewer snakes”.

What educators are realising is that action is possible and no longer, well at least in New Zealand, is there any excuse for inaction. It is no longer a case of “us” and “them”. You know the scenario – “We want to change but they won’t let us!”  “The regulations are so restrictive!” “It’s the curriculum that isn’t appropriate!” “Secondary should be …..!” “Tertiary should be …..” “If only others would do this, that and the other thing!” Same old, same old, boring , boring!

I pointed out to the conferences that while the education pipeline may be badly leaking, quite a number of students are getting through it with great success. Long may that continue. But now is the time for us to once and for all fix those leaks.

Bill Gates summed it up: “We used to say that we needed to do something about all those young people who were failing because it is hurting them. Now we say we need to do something about all those young people who are failing because it is hurting us!”

For those interested the material presented at the two conferences mentioned above is available at www.manukau.ac.nz/multiple.pathways and at http://mite.tasmanit.com/

Stuart Middleton
EdTalkNZ
14 July 2011

Since the early 1980s New Zealand and Australia have had an agreement to work closely together in trade and financial matters. The “Closer Economic Relations” agreement, as it is commonly called, was thought to be a progressive recognition of the need for two countries with clear differences but many more similarities to work together to their mutual benefit.

The time has come for a Closer Education Relations Agreement between our two countries.

Why would you do this? Well perhaps the key reasons would be the advantages of a synchronised curriculum which would ease the flow of students between the two systems. Resourcing the development of curriculum, supporting its implementation and refreshing it through professional development and activity is expensive. The scale of economy in setting out to work co-operatively in this would be not only have potential fiscal advantages but also professional ones.

New Zealand teachers would benefit from having a larger canvas with which to work and Australian teachers from contact with those areas in which they could learn. These areas come and go a little but at different times New Zealand had an advantage in its approach to reading instruction, at another Australia was clearly ahead in the use of technology. As a generalization, New Zealand is string in the generation of ideas while Australia has strengths in implementation

At the tertiary / postsecondary level there would be gains in synchronising the approach to student loans and allowances and to an Australasian approach to collecting those loans from students after they graduate.

International Education might well have a much stronger brand were it to be an Australasian brand rather than two separate brands both of which had their own issues.

Initial reactions to this brief sketch will probably be driven by nationalism and a belief that our separate national identities were so different that the outcome would be an inevitable loss of something precious, something we had each “fought for” and which was inviolate. But that is from a former age and the modern world is now a global world, a world made flat (to use Thomas Friedman’s term), a world in which communication across oceans is as easy as those across the street, where collaborative work (especially in education) is simple, a world in which our graduates see job opportunities and careers wherever they occur and not necessarily in the old home town.

There are other areas where co-operation if not amalgamation could be considered.

Qualifications frameworks could be synchronised (now there’s an idea that has languished) with fewer qualifications taught across our two countries. School leaving qualifications could be the same (that would be a hard one) and reporting regimes brought together (in a saga perhaps called National Standards meets Naplan.

Both our education systems share indicators that are similar when it comes to disengagement, success rates in schooling systems, access to early childhood education, completion rates in postsecondary education. We also both share similar levels of skill shortages(but in different areas), struggle to find a modern expression of apprenticeships that works, are heading towards producing too many degree graduates and too few middle level technicians.

If we share the problems and issues might not there be sense in working together towards solutions? But it would require a different kind of thinking.

Solutions could only emerge if the thinking could get beyond such searching questions as “Who invented the pavlova?” and “Was Crowded House an Australian band?” It would have to move beyond referring to or perhaps even caring about the under-arm bowling fiasco of 1981. It would have to forget the us and them mentality that goes both ways.

In short we would have to rediscover the ANZAC spirit but this time in the battle against ignorance and educational failure. WE would have to take a lesson from those sporting codes (soccer, basketball, rugby league and netball) which have found few issues in operating across national borders.

Of course our history would continue to be taught but would not we each benefit from understanding the history of our neighbour? Of course our literature would still be read but how much richer the choice if there was a developed knowledge of each other’s literature? Mathematics, science, large amounts of the business subjects, international languages, engineering and many technical areas all operate with ease in an international environment and indeed rely on an international context to exist.

It is worth thinking about but later – I have to dash off to renew my passport so that I can get into Australia!

Stuart Middleton
EDTalkNZ
11 July 2011

I was chatting with some folks the other day about careers advice and guidance and all that stuff. I put forward the view that what we should aspire to is to give every young person the “middle class advantage” that we had enjoyed. Of course someone had to ask me just what I meant!

Well, for a start there is the advantage of being brought up to believe that the purpose of schooling was to learn things that would eventually get us a job.  We knew with certainty that we would work. Not only because there were jobs to go round but also because that was why you went to school.

And it was an advantage to be brought up believing that school was important and that enjoying it was of less importance than doing what we were told to do when we were told to do it. We were encouraged to have questioning minds but to never question the teachers. Trouble at school meant trouble at home and homework was done before the radio was allowed on. I am sure that all that helped.

Then there was the question of which career pathway to follow. Well, since being in work was valued more highly than which job we had, simply getting ready into work was the goal. I became a teacher probably because of the availability of a secondary teaching studentship which provided a wage. We did have an uncle who had been a teacher so I guess that helped but I do not recall ever discussing it with him.

Another thing that helped was exactly that – help with homework. Mum, Dad, older  brothers were always there to help. Except on one occasion in intermediate school when the homework in mathematics stumped the whole family. Not once, but a few nights in a row. Well, Mum had the answer to that. On her bike and off to see the teacher.

“What’s the use of homework they can’t do?” she asked the teacher. “It teaches them to think, fudge and more fudge.” Well, that soon stopped and we got back to homework we could do. You see, being able to deal with the school was also a middle class advantage. Being able to intervene in education, to get what you want (in this case happy children) is not a skill or an opportunity open to everyone.

Then it came to holiday employment. First it was, at about the age of eight, employment as a grocer’s assistant. The grocer was our uncle. There’s another middle class trait – having a family that can organise these opportunities. Ten shillings a week and our own apron, bagging potatoes, weighing nails, making up the orders and then helping with the delivery.  The delivery thing came to a halt when one afternoon my brother fell out of the door of the old and quite rickety delivery van.  It was all hushed up, no health and safety in those days!

But we learned the skills of employment, a good day’s work for a good days pay, honesty, cleanliness etc. I worked pretty well every school holiday after that and each of those opportunities came along through contacts of the family.

Of course there were no student loans and allowances to speak of but with a bit of help from Mum and Dad, no board, a little car brought for us to share and to get to the university and suchlike we did OK.

Any failure we had at university was almost of our own making but that was where the middle class advantage wore thin and we did not have a clear idea of what we needed to do – first generation students and all that.

There is nothing in this middle class advantage thing – and as a phenomenon it is clear – that educational institutions could not with some thought and with a little planning provide for every student. Of course there would not be the evening meal discussions, the questions (“What does a X or a Y or a Z do Mummy?”), the steering of aspirations towards achievable directions (I was deflected from wanting to be a farmer – “We could never help you buy a farm and you’ll be a share-milker the rest of your life!”) nor that whanau collection of contacts (well, when you think of it there could be a network that was almost as good).

The middle-class advantage, let’s see that all students get it.

Stuart Middleton
EDTalkNZ
7 July 2011

In the world of DIY there are products along the lines of NO GAPS which allow you to deal with gaps as they appear or even in new work to maintain those continuous lines and surfaces that lead to a quality finish. 

Continuity of progress is central to students achieving a good result and a gap in the educational journey is disruptive, counter-productive and in some cases the cause of failure and disengagement. The cumulative gaps lead to loads that many students simply cannot endure.

There are a number of reasons for this. One is cognitive: as Vygotsky described it, there is a “zone of proximal development”, a point at which students can with help learn. It occurs just on the edge, the fringe, of previous learning not at some spot that is removed from it or distant to it. Therefore the connection to previous learning is critical. Seamlessness in educational journeys is all.

Many students fail early in their further and higher education for this reason alone. There is a disconnection between their previous learning and what they are now encountering. This might be one of generally inadequate academic preparation or it might be a disciple deficiency. Or it might be the result of poor teaching either before or after the transition from school to post-school. As an educational issue it is serious, is often ignored and is generally seen as the fault of the student.

So getting a “no gaps” mentality into the educational system will require a far greater effort on the part of further and higher education and pose some challenges to the high school sector.

Of course, some higher education institutions simply keep raising the requirements for entry into courses and eventually will have made entry too difficult for such a number of students with the result that they will have taken themselves to a place where students entering courses are prepared to cope with whatever they are thrown. This also enables them to dispense with the support mechanisms required by higher maintenance students. It will depress their numbers and results with under-represented groups but there will be other institutions to pick up that responsibility.

Funding formulae for further and higher education that does not adequately reflect the efforts required to see that there are NO GAPS are simply not adequate. Similarly in high schools there has to be recognition that social class, the way we distribute ethnicity throughout a city and the challenges of low or no income groups make the provision of education in some schools a far greater responsibility and a far harder task than in some other schools. To fund school equally is to fund them unequally.

But gaps are not only the result of inadequate academic preparation or misplaced accuracy in assessing the needs of students, there is also the designer gap as in the “gap year”. Origninally this was the domain of the soft upper classes in the UK who were generally succeeding and were not troubled at all by a gap in the journey. But it has become a notion that not only has spread but which is admired and condoned. “My son / daughter is taking time out / finding their feet / deciding what to do….” and so on are official gaps and the evidence is ambivalent as to how this aids progress.

The final arguments for NO GAPS approach  hinge around clear evidence that if a student proceeds through school and into a postsecondary qualification without a gap they are highly likely to also undertake and complete a further qualification at a level in advance of the first qualification completed after leaving school. The road to advanced qualifications is perhaps one characterised by NO GAPS.

It could be that a “lifelong learner” is the result of this smooth and uninterrupted journey from the novitiate of the early years through to the advanced state of being a self-sufficient learner at a later age and a higher stage. The American Dream of a college degree for all has become the nightmare that it is because this smooth passage through educational stages is seriously disrupted. A great confusion of gaps characterises the community college where qualifications are significantly marked by remediation.

Most do-it-yourself exponents will tell you that those NO GAPS products have limits and their success relies on a solid structure each side of the gap and there are limits to the gaps they can close. My Dad was always saying of a extension he made to our house many years ago that should an earthquake occur we were would in trouble – “all the putty will fall out!” he would say.

Too many students face this threat when the seismic transitions they are asked to make give them a good shake-up. You can’t fill large educational gaps through some quick fix.

Stuart Middleton
EdTalkNZ
30 June 2011

In both Australia and New Zealand currently there is increased discussion about the need to engage young people especially but more people generally in  vocational and technical education.

In New Zealand the Government is pursuing a policy it calls Youth Guarantee which is an umbrella under which a variety of initiative aimed at keeping students in education and directing increased numbers into vocation and technical courses are being encouraged. In Australia, a recent report[1] makes explicit the valuable role that VET is playing in Australia in a wide range of programmes. It also makes clear the role VET is playing in bringing a semblance of equity into the Australian postsecondary provision.

The performance of education systems in both countries would look pretty sad if only the contribution of the universities was the measure of equitable access to qualifications and the benefits that come with them. A critical mass of students from traditionally under-represented groups find positive pathways through programmes offered at a sub-degree level and which lead them to those highly valued technical and middle level qualifications of which both countries are very short.

There is no evidence that there is a shortage of degree graduates in either country and when there are such shortages it is often in areas that have declared the need for a degree level qualification despite the proven worth of diploma qualification over many years – I think of various levels of teaching, nursing, town planning and so on. In New Zealand IPENZ the professional body for engineers has recently completed a survey that shows that the pressures in that sector come not from a shortage of degree-qualified people but from a serious shortage of those qualified with middle level and technical qualifications.

Therefore the setting of targets related to proportions of the population who should have degrees is simply a silly exercise. Australia and the UK with their 40% targets are ignoring the importance of having a spread of qualifications across levels to maintain industry and commerce. Even the credibility of such targets has been attacked in Britain where, it is claimed, the government would be stretched beyond their limit by the capital expenditure if this were to be the goal and even if they could, where would the teachers come from? It simply wouldn’t happen.

In the US, the even higher targets mean even less when so many of their indicators are headed to the frozen south at a great speed. Of course the broadening of the goal that every one should go to “college” was achieved through the development of community colleges in the US – this adding of opportunity underneath the conventional “higher education” happened also in New Zealand.

New Zealand used to have a clear “higher education” sector which required the University Entrance qualification and generally five years at secondary school. This was a track favoured by about 10% of each cohort. Others left earlier to enter employment or vocational education and often both. But the removal of pathways through the mid-1970s to thje mid-1990s saw many young people stranded with nowhere to go – the only choice was to remain at schools in which the curriculum had become comprehensive and markedly academic.

But we are seeing our way out of that now and a renewed focus on pathways and linked learning that both sets students in a direction but with options is likely to see a reversal in the worrying trends of disengagement, low qualification, poor preparation and the other facts that weight so heavily in terms of equitable access to further and higher education and the rewards that go with it. Who knows, one day our system might even develop some of the flexibility of the Scandinavians and other and students with credible middle level qualifications gained in a vocational area will be able to transfer with ease into higher level qualifications should they wish to.

But if New Zealand and Australia want to make real, the professed commitments to equitable access to further and higher education and to meaningful qualifications it will require changes in policy settings (that is happening), investment of resources where it will make an impact (that must be at the senior secondary / lower tertiary levels) and a different level of parity of esteem between those meeting the needs of the countries through different pathways by different provision with different sets of people.

Stuart Middleton
EdTalkNZ
27 June 2011
 

I have long been interested in School Journals and from time to time idly scroll through what is available on TradeMe with the result that I have some interesting publications.

A School Journal from 1908 gives a glimpse of the times and it would be hard to mount an argument that relevance and a reflection of students’ lives was essential if learning was to occur based on the evidence of the content. But then again schooling hadn’t assumed the critical role of responsibility for the development of the person at that point in time. It was much more focussed on knowing things.

In the 1930’s the Journals had quite a lot of very patriotic material and indeed there is one I have that is a tribute to the dead King. Long live the King!

The Janet and John Series, which was the staple diet of my “reading programme” when I was little is remarkable for the stilted and contrived stories, the lack of awareness as to gender stereotypes, and much more. But we learned to read with them so perhaps that didn’t matter.

But the latest addition to this little collection is exciting. Who would have thought that a School Bulletin could be the subject of national controversy? But in 1964 that was exactly the case. A bulletin, well technically the series was styled as A Bulletin for Schools and served as supplementary reading material, was published, distributed to schools, and then withdrawn under orders from the Minister of Education and all copies destroyed.

Washday at the Pa, was a reflection of life in a rural setting of a Maori family that lived in a house, “near Taihape”, that was rudimentary in its services, unpretentious in its quality and something of a shock to the urban sensitivities of many. The family went about the daily life in such a setting with the kids doing what kids do, Mum coping with the demands of a household and Dad out on the farm looking after the sheep. It was a real house, a real family and the photographs were very real indeed.

In itself the simplicity of the story and the photographs that were a feature of it has a charm. Both were the work of Ans Westra, then a young writer and photographer who was well-known through her work in the publication Te Ao Hou, the publication of the then Maori Affairs Department. She was also the author (and photographer) of an earlier bulletin about village life in Tonga, Viliami of the Friendly Islands.

But the newspapers sensed controversy and this led to the Maori Women’s Welfare League discussing the publication at its conference and collectively objecting to it. One participant was reported at the time to have felt that “the living conditions shown are not typical of Maori life, even in remote areas. There are very few Maori people living in such conditions anywhere in New Zealand.”

Within a week the Minister of Education ordered that all 38,000 copies of the bulletin be withdrawn and destroyed. Well obviously they weren’t all destroyed because I now have a copy of the bulletin. That wasn’t the end of the story. The Caxton Press, the well regarded publishing house in Christchurch, later produced a version of the bulletin for the wider public and this seems to have been motivated by both the public’s right to have access to this controversial publication and an assessment of the inherent quality of it. The author made one or two minor changes which in themselves are interesting – the brand of the soap being used in one picture is no longer obscured and the rather mischievous young lad is now allowed to be seen puffing on a “cigarette” that he had made out of a lolly paper. These images were presumably too corrupting for classroom use.

Perhaps of more interest is one further change. In the original publication there is a photograph of the almost completed new house that the family was going to shift to under the government’s re-housing scheme. The politics of the decision to first include and then exclude this picture in the two versions of the publication we can only wonder about.

The allegation that the bulletin was “not typical” is interesting. Was it because that portrayal of the family showed living conditions that were worse than “typical” or better? The discussions never made that clear. And should reading material put before students be “typical” – the Janet and John Series of readers were certainly not that. Nor were some of the later Ready to Read Series (such as the one in which Mummy and the two children, one boy and one girl, wave goodbye to Daddy as he takes off in the Viscount!).

What seems to have been central to the withdrawal was the role of the Maori Women’s Welfare League and one can only wonder whether there was any process in those days for consultation about material being produced for schools? After the event discussion doesn’t work as well as consultation prior.

So, all in all, it is a good little story, this publication and withdrawal and destruction of a good little story. It is interesting to speculate as to how such a controversy would have played out nowadays or even if there would be a controversy.

Stuart Middleton
EdTalkNZ
13 June 2011

From San Francisco

I’m over in the USA catching up with colleagues working in the secondary / tertiary interface area. California is experiencing pretty tough times politically and economically with budgets under real pressure and education budgets taking a hit. It’s worse here than it is at home.

It always surprises me when we get chatting how much we share in common with our American colleagues. But it wasn’t in the area of secondary / tertiary interfaces that we found an item of shared interest that dropped out of a conversation. It was with regard to the little ones under five years of age. We concluded that both our systems were under some pressure due to much the same issue – confusion between day care and early childhood education.

Childcare is where a young little one is looked after with care and to a high standard by people qualified to provide such care. They attend to their creature needs and see that they are happy and relaxed and getting along well with their peers and with adults. Of course some learning takes place – no-one has yet discovered how to stop little ones learning thank goodness, but it is not the structured teaching and learning of an early childhood education programme. These childcare centres require people with the requisite skills and they need to be closely regulated and controlled. But that are not early childhood education centres.

Early childhood education is structured teaching in ways that are appropriate to 3 and 4 year olds in areas that are appropriate and methods that reflect the critical concern for non-cognitive behaviours. There is an element of school-readiness in this and it is in addition to the care of little ones who remain very much in need of a safe environment under the watch of highly trained teachers.

Our current 1-5 system is seriously confused about these distinctions and the boundaries are so blurred that “care” and “education” mean much the same thing.

Over the past 10 days in this blog we have dealt with the three dots of a successful start to lifelong learning – two years of quality early childhood education, graduating from high school and gaining a postsecondary qualification. Currently New Zealand is doing quite well with the first of these until the provisions of quality early childhood education (two years of 15 hours per week) is scrutinized in urban areas of high Maori and Pasifika populations. Access is unacceptably low in many of these areas and until we get all three and four year olds into quality early childhood education for 15 hours a week over two years, the resources for pre-school care and education should be directed to that end.

I applaud the scrapping of the twenty hours on non-means tested care/education and applaud the scrutiny that the resources are now going to be put under. Yes, I have sympathy for those who need the twenty free hours to work in order to supplement their incomes but that is another issue. The ECE resource must be used according to principles of access for little ones not the size of their parents mortgages and rationed according to rules around universal ECE access. All three and four year olds must be in an early childhood centre for two days a week for the two years prior to their starting school. When that is achieved and cemented in place a more liberal approach might be able to be taken.

Of course there is nothing to stop centres both private and state offering child care for those younger but this must not be at the expense of 3 and 4 year olds getting their early childhood education and therefore this becomes the priority for state funding. There is probably enough to go around.

I have had final responsibility for early childhood centres as a secondary principal, as a senior manager in a teachers college, at a polytechnic and most recently as Chairman of Directors of a company that ran among its many activities, five early childhood centres. I know how the funding levers work and how they act in a perverse manner to achieve objectives that are not those of offering quality early childhood education to all three and four year olds for the two years before school. I know what the levels of trained staff do to the income streams. It all needs looking at.

The early years have become the last bastion of funding by volume and the results have been no more acceptable than they ever proved to be at other levels.

Stuart Middleton
EdTalkNZ
9 June 2011
 

I failed with some style in my first year at university. My twin brother and I were the first in our family to attend university and we took failure in our stride just as easily as we took success. Oh well, that is what happens we supposed. We bounced back and I have long since described the four year approach to the first three year degree as strategic and based on the view that allowing the concrete to set well in the foundations led to many a good building.

It is a complex business being the first. My subject choices through secondary school were relatively random and the only assistance I got at home was a single comment at the beginning of the third year secondary when my Mum said that “Dad wonders if you should be taking a subject that is related to getting a job.” This was when I determined that I would do music as a subject – at that point the only music I had was what was learned in a brass band having missed out on tuition on the bagpipes for various reasons which would have allowed us to follow in our father’s footsteps or is that fingerprints (with grace notes)?

I can recall no discussion about careers around the dinner table or indeed about subject choice. We selected subjects on the basis of what we thought we could manage and what we thought we might like. So Form 5, the School Certificate year and here I was taking English, mathematics, Latin, Music and French. I passed School Certificate in the days when you needed 200 marks in your best four subjects including English with 32 marks to spare. I wondered if I should perhaps ease back a little to avoid burnout.

Latin got dropped in subsequent years. So when it came to university, subject choice for the first year was based on what? Well that was simple; I wanted to go to the new fledging university in Hamilton (still a branch of Auckland University and only in my second year to become the University of Waikato) and had no appetite for leaving Hamilton at that point. So I chose subjects from the literal handful that they offered – French, English and History, declining to do geography. Yes, that’s it folks when it came to choosing university subjects in Hamilton in 1964!

It was in History where I came unstuck. Our Mother was very interested in history but it was New Zealand history and there I was becoming acquainted with Japanese, German and US history. And having not been taught at school to write a history essay my efforts were what might be described as hesitant. I blame no-one for this because it simply was how things were.

You see, there was never any doubt about both the job I was headed towards and the fact that I would get one. I had applied for and secured what was called in those days a Teaching Studentship – you got paid wages to go to university to be a teacher. Yes someone decided that at the age of 17 I was likely to be satisfactory teacher which was either an act of faith or a sign of desperation for teachers which were in very short supply in the 1960’s. We were bonded year for year to teach at the end of our education and training.

So it was with an incomplete degree that I headed off to teachers college in Auckland. I arrived late to be given a stern talking to by the principal of the day (I had been completing National Service in the army so he was on shaky grounds). I was given a ticking off by a respected principal of a prestigious school when I went there on teaching practice – what do you think of coming here with an incomplete degree? My suggestion that he should think of it as a BA -1 was clearly not a path to pursue. At the teachers college I was advised sternly (for these were pretty stern days) that I must enroll in Education at Auckland University. I could see no sense in this as I was at Teachers College where I had a not unreasonable expectation that they would deal with Education on the way through. I enrolled in Anthropology 1.

Of all the papers I did, these were the best. This was the only time in my first degree that New Zealand was mentioned. Maori Studies had progressed only as far as appointing a lecturer and Anthropology dealt with those topics. Dr Ranganui Walker taught a course that introduced us to dimensions of Maori, both modern and ancient, that my education had studiously declined to do up to that point. Rev. Bob Challis taught a course on Pacific Islanders in New Zealand and opened our eyes to the phenomenon of migration to New Zealand. Dr Les Groube in the physical anthropology course took us up to Orakei Basin for an archaeological dig on the pa site there. And there was a course on Aboriginal society in Australia. This stuff was close to home and excited me more than anything else I had studied. There was also a course on monarchies in African societies that I suppose we did because of a lecturer’s PhD studies.

It was the only paper in my first degree in which I scored an A pass. Finishing on a high note has always been a good philosophy in study as well as sport and most other things!

By the end of my first degree I no longer thought of myself as a first generation student. Twelve of the fourteen members from the next generation of our family completed a university degree. We simply expected them to succeed.

Stuart Middleton
EdTalkNZ
28 March 2011

Any parent with young children knows of that suspicion that all might not be well when the children go quiet and the sound of play, the squabble and just of general activity cannot be heard. It’s a bit like that in education in New Zealand at the moment.

I think it is very much to do with the post-earthquakes period where the successive and overwhelming tragedies of the shocks in Christchurch and the earthquake / tsunami double tragedy in Japan have been numbing to everyone to a degree relative to the personal impact. All this has happened relatively quickly on the heels of the Australian floods. It’s been a huge amount happening in a short span of time in our little slice of the world.

What happens is that for a time everything else, the old daily grizzles, the ongoing issues, the standard stand-offs, all seem rather unimportant. In fact, there is almost an element of bad taste when the media leave these tragedies behind and return to their same old themes – they all ring a little bit hollow.

Education was affected considerably. Some schools in Canterbury have been destroyed, many damaged and most disrupted. Rebuilding all of this is a huge task for government agencies and communities. In more normal circumstances a rebuild of this magnitude would have been an opportunity to have a think about the shape of compulsory education – are the schools in the right places, of the right configuration and articulating in the best way. Just as once the intermediate school emerged as a solution right for an issue of the day, so too might the junior high school, the senior / community college or some form of transfer institution and other innovations might have been appropriate. But the imperative will probably be to restore to each community that which was there before the events of September 2010 and February 2011.

It is reported in the media that the University of Canterbury has lost around 400 students who have not returned to the university and have not enrolled elsewhere. This is a serious disruption to the lives of those young people but they too have other things on their minds at this time. I wonder how many students from Christchurch have not returned but have enrolled elsewhere? Whatever the number the University of Canterbury has some remarkable issues to deal with as it gets back into business with some classes in marquees while buildings are checked and restored to a safe condition. Institutions take a real hit when something of this magnitude happens.

Other institutions are also coping with the huge return to something resembling normal activity. But in amongst it all some good responses have emerged. Primary students in some numbers have been absorbed into other schools that have capacity. For many this will be looked back on something of an adventure at a time when families were disrupted. The dual use of secondary school sites by different schools was new to this country – might this lead to something that could be used permanently as the senior secondary school becomes more flexible?

Acts of kindness have brought to the fore a generosity of spirit within education – institutions elsewhere hosting groups or programmes or even individual students. It is not as easy as it sounds to transplant an activity or a student into another setting and it requires great effort on both sides. It would be good if all this was being documented to remind us of what can be done and perhaps even without the impetus brought by tragic events.

But to return to where we started – the children do seem rather quiet.

Is this the longest period of time we have gone without an NCEA story, the usual tale of trivial importance treated by the media with an ersatz gravitas? Where were the annual start-of-year stories about the incredible pressure universities were under as enrolment numbers reached unprecedented levels?  Why no stories about the terrible cost of school uniforms, the outrageous demands for school donations and the increased traffic as schools and tertiary institutions got under way? Major pay settlements for secondary principals and secondary teachers passed us by with cursory treatment.

Why? Because those stories don’t matter. What matters is the fact that a majority of students in New Zealand go to school and other education institutions each day supported by their parents and caregivers, do what they are told and what they love doing and yet, due to the might of natural forces, they were unable to do so in unprecedented numbers. That was perhaps the education story of a hundred years.

But it didn’t take long before the media moved on or was it back? Page after page on school bullying and violence. It matters but somehow it seems to be simply bad taste when there must be stories about the recovery of schooling in Canterbury that deserve to be told.

Stuart Middleton
EdTalkNZ
24 March 2011

There is some irony that the word “choice” has won a firm place in the lexicon of youth as a word of approbation. For instance “It was choice” suggests that whatever is being referred to is positive and perhaps even at the top of whatever scale of pleasure it is appropriate. The word “Choice!” on its own is alongside others such as “fabulous”, “wonderful” and the loathsome and overused “awesome” as a declaration of satisfaction, joy, perhaps even ecstasy.

The irony is that choice carries with it risk. In education we suggest that choice comes with maturity and so we characterise the early years (well, the first ten years actually) as ones in which there is a “compulsory curriculum “within the “compulsory education” requirements which extend to age 16 years and even to age 18 years in education systems that can’t think of anything else to do in response to issues other than raise the school leaving age!

I do not wish to distract myself into a discussion of school leaving ages but in passing it is worth noting that “compulsory” as a word has little force in keeping students at school and that compulsory school leaving ages are a nonsense which are simply a hangover over from the slow process of making education available to increasingly older students.

And within the compulsory school years there is a huge amount of choice. Attendance at school despite the clear intention of the law is a matter of choice for many young people. That this is will have an impact on their lives (either positive or negative) does not dawn on those who choose not to attend school.

When at school, much behaviour is a matter of choice. Doing what you are told when you are told to do it is a basic choice that is increasingly passed from the hands of the teacher into the hands of the students as they progress through the system and sometimes with dire consequences when poor choices are made. There is scope within “option structures” in the secondary school for students to make choices and the manner in which these are made is often arbitrary and not with due regard to the consequences.

So we rely very much on the ability of students to make good choices with very little evidence that we help them to develop the skills and processes required to ensure that choices made are ones that will benefit them. Of course they quite quickly find out about the poor decisions when these impact negatively on the needs of others – behaviour, uniform, safety, abuse and so on – but they carry the burden of poor choices made with regard to subject choices on their own shoulders. Students who can be helped in making choices by parents and caregivers are greatly advantaged.

The fact that the impacts of choices on the individual are very much an indication of the quality of choices made is an understanding that develops very slowly. In some adults it develops only after serious consequences (e.g. driving while drunk) and in others (e.g. those with mental health issues) perhaps never at all.

Do we need a set of training wheels attached to choices made by students? Well one set of wheels is certainly appropriate advice and guidance at all ages and flexibility in allowing some changes of choices once made. Neither of these is easy in institutions with large numbers of students often dealt with in groups.

Are post-secondary students immune from the issues of choices and decision making? I would have thought not. Requisites for entry into courses and programmes attempt to define the gates through which they should be capable of passing but they in themselves cannot give a very clear glimpse of the demands awaiting the students on the other side. Full realisation of the implications of choices made will only unfold during the early parts of the programme. And is it then too late to change the choice? Usually, failure and disengagement and a second start are the options when choices turn out to be wrong.

So we have an education system that allows a considerable amount of choice. Would a more constrained system achieve better results? Of course even to suggest this is an anathema to many, especially those who have made good choices that have turned out well. That’s fine but surely choice brings with it a responsibility on those who allow it to see that students are equipped, informed and helped to consider the options and range of choices and arrive at ones that are best for them.

The old saying about horses and water probably means something. There is a high likelihood that a horse that is thirsty will drink clean water. Does this offer us a clue about choice making in education?

Stuart Middleton
EdTalkNZ
14 February 2011

“If you can read, thank a teacher” the bumper sticker says.

I have just got through all the magazine reading that accumulated during the summer including an excellent article in the New Zealand Listener (20 January 2011, pp12-16). It was a compilation of contributions from famous New Zealanders about the “best advice I ever got.” On the face of it one might expect a success of clichés and sentimental homilies. But in fact there was one major surprise – many of the contributors credited a teacher with having given them their best advice or perhaps or advice about education from someone else.

Roger Hall, the playwright, was urged by a girlfriend’s mother who, in his words, “sensed that I lack a direction. “’Why don’t you go to teachers college?” she said. I knew instantly that was what I would do, and it was the making of me.” A considerable number of our artists and writers got their start in a teachers college. Where else in tertiary education was there such a concerted emphasis on the development of the individual?

But schools had also been influential to writers. Margaret Mahy goes right to a single teacher. “The best personal advice I remember came from my high school English teacher Ian McLean. He used to gallantly read the many stories I wrote and poems I wrote outside the constrictions of the school programme.

‘Keep on writing,’ he told me rather sternly when I expressed doubt and disappointment regarding my writing ability. “Keep on writing and reading.”

 Not all advice was heeded but some advice given while on the surface well-meaning might not always hit the mark. “David Mayhew once told me at Otago Boys’ High School that I shouldn’t slouch so much. He is now the Commissioner for Financial Advisers and I’m still slumped over a microphone, I fear I should have listened to him.”

 Prime Minister John Key, speaking about his Mum and the resourcefulness with which she coped with the impact of events around the time of the Second World War, notes that “she started a new life, relying on her education, her determination and hope.” A good education might well be the best thing you can bank for tough times.

The fact that few stayed in secondary school for five years is noted by Bob Jones. “Nearly 60 years ago I was a foundation pupil at Naenae College. It was pretty rough and ready, and by the time we got to the sixth form, only 10 of the original 200-styrong year group remained, everyone else having shot off to work in factories as soon as they turned 15.”  Thois was very typical of secondary education back then with about 5% lasting the distance in typical suburban multicourse secondary schools. Jones then goes on to give a beautiful picture of and tribute to his history teacher, Guy Bliss.

“Our first lesson was devoted to a single message – namely, never be afraid to pipe up and ask if you don’t know or understand. He went on about it being a behavioural rarity and the hallmark of all successful people. The subsequent half-century has repeatedly taught me the truth and importance of that message.” A further piece of advice was apparently “flogged” to the class. That message was “that absolutely everything is interesting. He was a fabulous teacher and ripped through the syllabus in one term proving his everything-is-interesting theme by devoting the second term to medieval church architecture, a somewhat alien theme for us state-house lot.”

This is packed with points that teachers should note. Ordinary commonsense advice about asking questions still remembered after 60 years and the refusal to allow “relevance” to restrict the history class to a diet of simply what the syllabus dictated stand out.

Sometimes it is an incident and the impact of advice that makes a lasting impression on young minds. Chef Annabel White retells a yarn: “Many years ago at Hamilton Girls’ High School there was a streaker (it was quite fashionable at that time). Ms Knaggs, the deputy principal, saw the young man running through the school. Instead of screaming shock horror she yelled ‘Go get him, girls!’ and the poor bloke, in panic, ended up caught up in the fence.” Turning a negative situation into a positive and empowering one was a key lesson for White on that day.

Finally Phil Goff remembers his Form 5 history teacher who suggested that he should take his education further. Goff’s father was at that time urging the young Phil to do an apprenticeship in carpentry. “I took that advice and became the first member of my family to go to university.”

There were a couple of others as well. But the influence of teachers and education in the lives of prominent New Zealanders is the tip of a huge iceberg of impact on all New Zealanders. Teachers and school are an important influence on people and the nation in which they live.

Stuart Middleton
New Zealand Education Review
Vol. 14 No.30, 7 August 2009, p.16
APN Educational Media (NZ) Ltd.
Wellington

The recent report from the Law Commission on booze, boozing habits and the impacts of booze was a sobering read commended to all who work with young people. But it was less the report itself than the manner of its preparation that has a lesson in it for education.

The Law Commission plays an interesting role in the legal fabric in New Zealand. Five Commissioners appointed by the Minister of Justice are supported by a relatively small team of researchers and some administrative support. The Commission works with independence both on issues it identifies with the law and the legal system and on specific areas on which the government seeks guidance and advice. Given this working environment, their reports have weight, are substantial contributions to discussion and are seen to be unbiased and informed views.

This is exactly what we need in education, an Education Commission modelled on the Law Commission. It would provide the government with learned, informed and substantial reports on issues in education which require attention but seem unable to free themselves from the tangled mass of vested interest and position to be defended. In education when it seems as if the mass of such issues has become critical we call for a Royal Commission.

The Currie Commission (1962) was the last full blown affair of this kind and it did address a number of issues: the recruitment and training of teachers; improvements in teachers’ conditions of service; the involvement of members of the community in the control and management of schools by restructuring administration at the district level; Maori education; a regular system of national assessment in the basic subjects along with a system of checks at certain points in children’s progress throughout the system and a range of issues related to the place and role of independent schools.

The problem with this approach is that they become a shopping spree for everyone to get their bit in and attempts to implement such a report inevitably results in distortions and different emphases from those intended. And public discussion that follows such reports usually take the form of once more through the chorus of the songs sung at submission time.

An Education Commission would be able to bring measured, researched consideration forward into the professional and public domain and perhaps enable us to work through some of the issues that percolate to the surface from time to time. Who might the commissioners be? If they are to have a role such as the Law Commissioners then the Education Commissioners would be experienced, highly qualified, comfortable in both the professional and public arenas of education and able to lead discussion nationally through major conference presentations, papers and publications.

Cost? Well less than a Royal Commission and perhaps even less than a team of consultants. The positions, if they are to be modelled on the Law Commission, would not be full time other than for the ongoing administrative team and the small research team. The Commissioners continue their daily work in whatever capacities they have – or so it seems.

What might the Education Commission consider?

The kinds of topic that the Education Commission might consider are ones where conventional advocacy groups are constrained by the requirements of the groups they represent, where solutions to issues might require changes to the law, to regulations, to accepted and conventional ways of working. They could constitute a series (as in the Law Commission’s series on the Courts) or one-off studies such as the alcohol report.

Now for some topics that the Education Commission might address or usefully might have addressed in the past.

Equitable universal access to early childhood

This is a vexed issue and the current collocation of policies and provision does not seem to be keeping pace with the changes in the demographics or in the social behaviour patterns of the community. Issues of bilingualism, of coping with sudden changes in demand, the location of early childhood centres in primary schools and home-based care are all dimensions that might be included.

Community contributions to schools

It would be good to have an authoritative look at the issue of community contributions to a school that sees hugely disparate levels of contribution being made in different communities. Does the state have a role, in the interests of an equitable system in regulating this? Should schools in communities with less capacity to contribute be funded to higher levels (oh dear, here come a few emails!). Who is responsible for the black education economy?

Governance of tertiary institutions

I wonder if the recent report on the governance of the ITP sector would have provoked a different reaction had it been produced by a body that could combine research and commentary rather than simply appearing out of the blue so to speak.?

Sectors and their role in students’ learning

Sometime the Education Commission could comment on larger issues and point to a future that might or might not be different. Sectors, for instance reflect in their current configuration the development of the education system rather than any body of knowledge about teaching and learning. What might the Education Commission think?

Curriculum sprawl

As the education systems have grown larger over the past century so too has trhe extent of the curriculum. To the three “R’s” has been added the two “E’s” (ecological sustainability, economic literacy) and a whole lot more. Little was taken out of the curriculum. Where did folk dancing go? An Education Commission might take a look at this – the curriculum not folk dancing!

The beauty of an Education Commission is that it could, like the Law Commission, act with independence relying on the experience and wisdom of its Commissioners tempered with the collective experience and wisdom and evidence of research.

Now, who is going to be a Commissioner? Well one would have to represent each of the sectors, state, integrated and independent – that’s 12. There would have to be one from each of the tertiary provider groups – that’s another 5. Then there are….. Commission, it could be more like a Conference unless we can bring ourselves to trust experience and wisdom.