Don Brash: An education policy built on choice, not privatisation

Don Brash

The president of the Post Primary Teachers Association, Debbie Te Whaiti, has let down members and the wider educational community with her disingenuous misrepresentation of National education policy.

The interpretation she puts on my speech on education reform [see link below] is so ludicrous it cannot be merely due to incompetence; it must represent a political agenda.

Her comments reminded me of John Tamihere's observation that the apparatus and activists of the Labour Party have heavily infiltrated the PPTA.

Our education system should ensure that every young person, regardless of their race or social background, is able to achieve their full potential. The current system is not delivering on that goal. It is idle to pretend that substantial change is not needed.

Too many parents are frustrated by the lack of choice for their children, by the political correctness drilled into their children, and by the conspiracy to hide failure and disguise the performance of their children and of their schools. Too many inspired teachers are frustrated and demoralised, and too many have left the profession.

Large numbers of students are leaving school without the basic rudiments of literacy and numeracy, particularly in the Maori and Polynesian communities. There is a huge gap between our best and worst educated students, and our national qualification, the NCEA, is in a state of chaos. Meanwhile, the teachers and principals on the front line are increasingly weighed down by the bureaucratic demands of the Ministry of Education.

I am astonished at the complacency of the apologists for all of this. Basic literacy and numeracy should be a national mission. It will be under National.

It will introduce a voucher entitlement for all children who at seven are not reading, writing and doing maths as well as they should. If a school, or teacher, is failing a child, parents will have another option.

The voucher would allow those children to access state-funded remedial tuition outside school hours.

Labour's priorities are all wrong. While parents are fundraising so their schools can hire extra teachers, the Government has hired more than 1200 extra people to work in the education bureaucracies. That is why National wants to slash the bureaucracy and put that money back into schools.

National will focus resources where they make the biggest difference. It wants to ensure good teachers are paid more and intends to give schools, boards and communities the ability to make their own decisions about what is best for children.

To set talented teachers free to provide improved education for our children, schools need a more flexible funding system. That is why National has proposed a single grant for schools covering their operational and salary costs. It is called bulk funding: the way we currently fund schools for everything except teacher salaries, the way we fund pre-school education, and the way we fund tertiary education.

Wherever such a funding model has been introduced, it has resulted in more teachers being employed. Moreover, as we slash the bureaucracy, schools will, in fact, be better funded than they are now.

Direction from bureaucrats in Wellington does not help these schools perform - quite the opposite. We will allow decentralised decision-making, and make schools answerable to their local communities.

National will trust principals and boards to do the right thing, but it will make them accountable. It wants to set some of the better-performing schools completely free of central government. They will continue to be publicly owned, but owned and directed by the local community, not by bureaucrats in Wellington.

Debbie Te Whaiti describes this as privatisation. I am happy for readers to make their own judgment about the integrity of that assertion.

Some of these schools may choose to expand. Others will not. It will be up to them, responding to the demand for schooling in their local community.

The PPTA president seems less interested in the needs of pupils and parents and more interested in defending an outdated, one-size-fits-all, Wellington-directed education system.

Parents should be given choices about how and where their child is educated. That is why National wants to relax zoning rules, so parents have more options over what school their child attends. That is why it will allow integrated schools to expand if there is demand from parents.

That is why it will reduce the extent that parents have to pay twice if they choose an independent school.

Who is in the best position to know what school children should attend? Who should determine what values should be imparted to them? Who cares for them most? Their parents or the Government?

Education is not the preserve of the Labour Party, the education bureaucracy and the teacher unions; it is the enterprise of every New Zealander concerned for our future.

Parents must be given the ability to wrest control back from centralised bureaucracies. Making decisions about the education of their children is one of the most important things parents will ever do. To provide them with genuine choice, we must empower good schools, good principals and good teachers to use their professional skills to provide an outstanding education.

That is the passport to a child's future, and at the moment too few children get one.

* National Party leader Don Brash is responding to the view of Debbie Te Whaiti, of the PPTA, that National wants to privatise a few elite schools and strip funding from the rest.