Cutting teachers funding for te reo lessons seems rather petty and pathetic - Editorial

Minister of Education Erica Stanford. Photo / Samuel Rillstone

EDITORIAL

The Government went old school last week and pulled out the cane – a piece of rattan, which has long been banned from education facilities – to give teachers, their union and bad parents “six of the best”.

Hundreds of thousands of New Zealanders would have endured this form of brutality, or at least witnessed it, back in the bad old days.

Yet Education Minister Erica Stanford and her deputy Act offsider, Associate Education Minister David Seymour, got out the solid timber vine, waved it about and instructed teachers, headmasters, school boards and students how they wanted their style of teaching delivered in a bid to lift the appalling education statistics.

Associate Education Minister David Seymour. Photo / Andrew MacDonald

Like the New Zealand health system, the education system is also broken, in need of life support and Stanford and Seymour’s diagnosis was pretty direct in language similar to DC Comics superhero Batman.

Whack! No more teacher-only days during the term unless authorised by the Education Minister. Seymour says teachers can have as many teacher-only days but in school holidays, when students are not at school.

Holy Heka! Money that funded teachers to learn te reo is gone and will instead be used to fund children’s maths books. Stanford said the Government is committed to the revitalisation of te reo Māori but learning maths is more important.

Kapow! Parents whose children are off school for no good reasons could be whacked with a fine.

Boom! Millions have been sliced from school lunches.

Crash! New Zealand’s largest education union, NZEI Te Riu Roa, warned the large-scale job cuts in the Ministry of Education will undermine critical support to schools and early childhood education services, and will ultimately have a negative impact on teachers and children.

In April, NZEI president Mark Potter warned job cuts at the Ministry of Education would have a drop-down effect for schools and their students.

“What we can see is that the services that support schools and students within the ministry are being slashed,” he said.

Potter said great innovative programmes such as Te Hurihanganui, which helped to build community solutions to support success for Māori learners, as well as other programmes that improved outcomes for Pasifika learners, ākonga with disabilities and migrant and refugee children, were also cut or de-funded completely.

Wallop! For our children’s sake, let’s hope the education roadmap Stanford and Seymour have plotted does not have more potholes than SH1. That would then be Transport Minister Simeon Brown’s problem.