Garth George: Education bosses pushing flawed ideology

The trouble with any bureaucracy is that it is wedded to the philosophy that one size fits all and, it seems to me, its practitioners are actively discouraged, from the moment they join it, from thinking outside the square.

This applies obviously to the bureaucrats of the Ministry of Education, who have decided that some of our most dedicated, committed and experienced early childhood educators will have to be laid off unless they achieve further academic qualifications.

Among them is a woman who, while not holding the specific qualification the powers that be consider necessary to teach in preschools, has a bachelor of education degree in primary teaching and has worked in early childhood centres for 16 years.

She has in that time gained a Playcentre Certificate and a diploma in music for early childhood education, done courses to keep her up to date with changes in the sector, and has raised a child.

Yet in the eyes of the bureaucracy she is not considered to be qualified under the Ministry of Education's funding rules.

This is bureaucracy gone mad, and it behoves Education Minister Anne Tolley to rein in this nonsense and force the education bureaucracy to make some exceptions, particularly since early childhood centres will be short of between 1500 and 2600 teachers next year.

Mrs Tolley has said she has asked education officials to come up with ideas for more flexible qualifications, but she will have to keep on their hammer because flexibility is a frightening word to bureaucrats. It means they might have to think.

Early Childhood Council chief executive Dr Sarah Farquhar points out that for many thousands of children in early childhood centres it would be a shame to be losing highly experienced and capable staff for the sake of meeting a target "based on ideology, not practicality".

And that's the guts of the matter. For it is deeply flawed ideology that has put our education system in dreadful disarray and the reason our literacy and numeracy standards have slipped alarmingly across the board.

The other crowd the minister needs to lower the boom on are the two teachers' unions - the New Zealand Educational Institute that represents primary and early childhood teachers, and the Post Primary Teachers' Association that represents secondary teachers.

The stranglehold these two organisations hold over education policy and practice will have to be smashed if the Government is to succeed in meeting its election promise of setting national standards in literacy and numeracy and having regular assessments of the performance of every primary and intermediate school.

Any suggestion that teachers be made accountable for their performances will be violently opposed by these education unions, as they have been any time the subject of teacher accountability has been raised.

On the early childhood front, the NZEI maintains that "watering down" the programme for the introduction of new qualification targets could compromise the quality of education. It says that "if you have quality and qualified teachers ... that's what makes the difference".

Which is nonsense, for it assumes that quality equates with qualifications. And any number of principals at all levels of education will tell you that academic qualifications often have little bearing on the quality of a teacher.

Rather, what they look for are things like passion for the task of educating a new generation and a natural understanding of, and empathy with, children and young people, as well as high expectations of the youngsters under their tutelage and the ability to challenge them to succeed. Inordinate patience and a persistence that never gives up is also required, and the flexibility to understand that every child is unique.

That last is a core problem in our secondary schools, which are infested by PPTA members who were trained to teach subjects rather than children. In the words of one gifted teacher of my acquaintance, "the sooner these old buggers retire, the sooner our high schools will make progress".

Instead of tinkering with things like early childhood qualifications, the Ministry of Education would be well advised to start doing something serious to attract young men to the teaching profession, for the feminisation of our education system is seen as one of its greatest drawbacks.

So bad has the dearth of male teachers become that in many schools the few male teachers who remain refer to the staffroom as "the henhouse".

Regularly we hear deep concern expressed that our boys and young men are not achieving well in our schools and the fundamental reason for that is that there are too few male teachers to guide their steps.

The National-led Government has a huge task ahead of it to revive and restore our education system. Dumping tried and true but not necessarily academically qualified early childhood teachers is not what's required.