Education policy Q&A: Trevor Mallard

Minister of Education Trevor Mallard sticks to his policies. Picture/ Paul Estcourt

The Herald invited politicians to answer questions at a range of policy forums - yesterday the focus was on transport. Today we examine education.

Below are edited highlights of the 45-minute question and answer session with Education Minister Trevor Mallard.

NCEA - was it a mistake and are you going to scrap it or change it?

Not a mistake, won't scrap it, could have done it differently and there will be changes. The slightly longer answer is that although I deferred it for one year when I became minister I think it would have been wiser to make the deferral longer or to bring it in, in a staged basis.

The big problem with scholarship was essentially the exams being too hard. That resulted in lower pass rates in some subjects than we thought would happen.

You said there would be changes to NCEA. Could you elaborate?

One of the questions is whether the achievement standards need to be as small as they are, so it's a question of whether they might be bigger. I think one of the big practical changes is where the kids sit Levels 1, 2, and 3, because it is pretty unusual to have an intense external examination system over three years.

What I'm going to do is encourage schools to focus on the individual students and to say to maybe half the students, "Look you're clearly going to achieve well at Level 3, why don't you focus on achieving that, rather than on the Level 1 exams this year?".

What about students who aren't academic?

One of my dreams is to have kids starting their apprenticeships while they're still at school and having the work that they do at school actually counting for their apprenticeship.

Kids would be doing maybe a couple of days at school doing some unit standards there, maybe a day at polytech working on some specialist equipment, which is not available in other places, and a couple of days out getting the work experience.

All of it as part of a junior apprenticeship, which would credit towards an apprenticeship. I think a lot of us have focused on university level education for our kids and that's sort of been the route that the whole system has been aimed at.

I think we've now got good numbers going to university and, in fact, good numbers in the polytechnics. The trades area is very important and I think we can get schools a bit more focused on that as well.

Have we got too many universities?

I think we certainly don't need any more from a national interest point of view. If you were designing the system again you probably wouldn't design it with as many.

Do you think the reputation of polytechs here has suffered because of the courses that have been offered?

I think the reputation of some of them has been affected by those courses. I think the system's reputation took quite a big hit with the CPIT (Christchurch Polytechnic Institute of Technology) courses, in particular, and there have been some others. But you have to be very careful about getting into a blaming culture in this area because we had a system whereby they were encouraged to get backsides on seats, and at the same time, until quite recently, their trades courses were badly underpriced.

So some of them obeyed the market signals and provided a whole pile of courses of questionable value, for which they were overpaid, in order to cross-subsidise the areas that they thought were important.

Was the Wananga doing that?

The Wananga got a lot of people into tertiary education who wouldn't have got in there otherwise. Some of the methodology, the value, the relevance and the pricing of some of the courses are now being worked through. But, I think one of the reasons we've got some of the lowest Maori unemployment rates for a very long time is that the Wananga was quite good at getting people out of bed in the morning, getting them to school, getting a bit of work habit going, and they went on and got jobs.

Now that doesn't excuse some of their mistakes but the more experience I have as minister, the more that I know that there are shades of grey, rather than just black and white.

Why don't you drop zoning and let parents choose where to send their children to school?

You've never been able to choose and you never will. You've really got the choice of two systems - where you live in the immediate neighbourhood and have the right to go to a school or you have a system where the school selects the pupils that they want.

I don't want to have a system where someone who lives on the boundary of a school is excluded, while someone gets in who maybe has more academic merit, or is a better sportsperson, or whose grandfather is prepared to write out a big cheque to the school.

I don't think that people should be able to hop past the slightly slower, slightly poorer, non-athletic kid who lives right next door to the school.

Have you closed too many rural schools?

Politically I've probably closed too many. I think educationally I probably haven't. If you go back through the years there's not that many more closed during that period than there were in the 1990s when there wasn't an official review system going on but things were still happening.

Should we teach values in schools?

Well my view is schools have taught values in different ways in the past. I am concerned about bullying in some schools and I think that it's an area that we've got to have a more coherent focus on.

How do we encourage kids not to be bullies - without getting to the point of where we bounce them out of schools - which I think we also do too easily in New Zealand.

How confident are you that your interest-free student loan policy will cost only $300 million?

There's always going to be a debate around behavioural effects. When we brought in interest-free loans for people while they were studying, we were told the proportion picking up the loans was going to go from 50 to 80 per cent.

Actually it stabilised on 55. I can see that an economically logical argument would be that everyone would borrow it, stick it in the bank and pay it all back on the day that they graduated, or maybe even keep it there - but it doesn't always coincide with people's behaviour.

There's some other reasons, which I don't think the economists understand, and that is around the changes in the way the scheme works. For example, in the past the fees used to go to the student, now they go to the university.

So you can't have your parents pay your fees to the university and then borrow down the extra amount or the same amount yourself. Now the deal is $150 a week and if you don't draw it down, you can't go back in two weeks' time and say "I really want that money".

There's no backdating arrangement. The other thing is I think there'll be some counterbalancing factors. I think that it will be an incentive to stay in New Zealand for a bit longer and to pay back and that will help.

I think that there will be some people who come back from overseas as a result of the policy.

How will your policies make early childhood, schools, and tertiary sector better?

There's been a major investment in each of the areas in quality. Teacher professional development, especially in schools; teacher education, especially in early childhood; improvements in ratios in both places; a switch in funding in the tertiary sector from backsides on seats with an increasing proportion going through the performance-based research fund through centres for research excellence. We're doing it so that everyone in New Zealand can achieve their educational potential because that is important for them.