That's the only scenario that makes any sense, rendering the Minister's painful explanation nonsensical, not to say insulting.
The Minister and her Cabinet colleagues might now realise that it is unwise to treat their constituents as fools, which they have done on this occasion. And they might now appreciate that picking a fight with the teacher unions is one thing; rarking up parents is quite another.
The parents who are most angered by this aborted attempt to save $43 million a year by gutting intermediate school staff rooms might well have voted for National in 2008 and again last year, and while it might not be too late to get them back on-side on this occasion, the two Ministers of Education National has appointed so far have not done the party any favours. And that is a shame, because what appears to be incompetence at a ministerial (and no doubt ministry) level is jeopardising at least two very good policies that need to be delivered on.
National standards, providing there is no further erosion of teachers' ability to actually teach, and providing resources will be made available for the children identified by those standards as needing help, which might be a tall order in these straitened times, should make a major contribution to lifting achievement levels at the lower end of the spectrum. The teacher unions will continue to fight them tooth and nail, although their major concern seems to be the publication of league tables, but the majority of parents seem to think they are a good idea, and indeed they are.
It is also to be hoped that the Minister continues to pursue performance pay for teachers, a system that works very well in every field of human endeavour except the civil service. Kaitaia Intermediate School principal Sue Arrell said in response to the budget that she believed the reduction in teacher numbers was designed to pay for national standards and performance pay, and might well have been right. In that case implementation might have to be delayed, but the way things are going they seem doomed to go the same way as just about every other National Party proposal for educational reform has gone in recent years.
Given the speed of last week's back-down it seems that the government does understand that it cannot afford to offend parents on the scale achieved by the Budget, and that if meaningful changes are to be made, parents must be persuaded that those changes will benefit their children. How Ms Parata and her advisers thought taking a slasher to intermediate teacher numbers was going to win parents' approval passes all understanding, but it is not too late.
Whether the current Minister is the person to lead this is debatable, but the suggestion made by Association of Intermediate and Middle Schooling president Gary Sweeney last week was eminently sensible. He called for a moratorium on staffing cuts at all levels of schooling, and for the Ministry of Education to sit down with everyone involved in education to examine teaching and learning needs in schools. It was time, he said, to look at the entire education system rather than continuing to tinker with it. Hear hear.
There is no doubt that there are savings to be made in education, or more to the point that some of the billions poured into it every year could be better spent. Wastage is probably more likely to be found at the tertiary level than at the other end; the best place to start, perhaps, would be to look at the range of courses offered by universities and polytechnics, and to weed out those that serve no other purpose than to take the unemployed off the dole and put them on to student loans. That would likely free substantial sums of money that could be better spent at the other end of the continuum, starting with kindergarten.
Pre-school education became extraordinarily expensive under the last Labour government, while enrolments remained little more than static, and a high price is now being paid for that. Kindergarten in particular should return to providing three- and four-year-olds with their first taste of formal education, as opposed to remaining the extension to day care that it has become, with the focus on quantity rather than quality.
The time has well and truly come to examine the funding that is provided for pre-school education, primary, secondary and tertiary, to determine what it should be achieving and what it actually is achieving. That, surely, is a process that the teacher unions would support, and would be welcomed by parents. It might well be that additional funding isn't needed if the money that is already being spent can be spent to better effect.
And if that leads to larger class sizes, we should have a rational discussion about that too. There is no evidence that this writer is aware of that larger class sizes are a predictor of lower achievement levels, whatever the unions might say to the contrary. And remember, the proposal that was part of this year's Budget was to fund classes at a maximum of 27.5 children per teacher. The current maximum class size range is from 23 to 29. Hardly radical.
It's worth noting too that Greece reportedly has the OECD's lowest pupil/teacher ratio, and Finland the highest. The education system in Greece currently sits at the bottom of the OECD table, Finland's at the top.
There are many factors to consider when it comes to why some children learn and others don't, and class size might be one of them. It seems doubtful that it is more important than a host of others though, from home environment and parent involvement to teacher quality. All things to consider when education is taken apart and put back together again, perhaps, although Mr Sweeney is probably whistling in the wind. More's the pity.
