KEY POINTS:
The number of children in a school classroom is obviously important to the education each can receive but for many years now we have been led to believe it is the single most important element. Class sizes, or teacher-pupil ratios, have been the profession's explanation for every deficiency discovered in the service it is providing. Reducing class sizes has been its suggested solution to every problem.
Governments have generally accepted the profession's advice and the ratios have been reducing, though the teacher associations always want them lower. When the Herald invited the main political parties' education speakers to summarise their policies in the recent election campaign, Labour's minister Chris Carter, began: "I would continue to support teachers, as we are doing with lowering class sizes, by dealing with the issue of pay."
National's spokeswoman, Ann Tolley, made no such commitment and now that she is Education Minister she must be glad she did not. For the results, just published, of an important research project by an Auckland University professor of education, John Hattie, have challenged the notion that class size is the most important factor in a pupil's progress.
The 15-year study, drawing on results of 50,000 items of research on pupils' performance around the world, came to the unsurprising conclusion that the quality of a teacher's interaction with pupils, particularly the "feedback" they received for their efforts, was most important. Other variables such as class size, school type, homework, diet and exercise, came well down the list.
One implication of his findings, Dr Hattie suggests, is that it is better to spend money on rewarding good teachers than simply hiring more teachers, which was the means of reducing class sizes. Bravely he has made a case for something highly contentious in his profession: performance pay.
Another implication, he suggests, is that parents should take more interest in the quality of their children's teachers than the type of school they attend. Parents should be alert to whether their child can easily approach the teacher for help, and to the feedback the child receives.
This sort of interaction is obviously easier in a class of 20 than one of 40 but the average number is now at a point that the marginal value of further reductions must be much less than the value to be gained if more pupils were taught by talented and highly motivated teachers.
These findings are not welcomed by the teachers' unions, which bargain for pay scales that reflect responsibilities and experience, not measures of excellence. Those would be extraordinarily problematic, says the head of the Post-Primary Teachers' Association.
The new minister agrees that rewarding excellence is a tricky issue. Ms Tolley says she wants Dr Hattie to join her intended cross-sector discussion group on the difficulties of attracting, training and retaining sufficient teachers at present.
Pay for performance may always be too hard for national negotiations that would need to find agreed measures of excellence. But it would present little difficulty if left to school principals and their boards. Principals have to know which of their staff make the effort to interact well with pupils, which of them the pupils readily trust to ask for help and receive a useful response. Dr Hattie says the desired level of trust is very rare.
The new Government appears to have no interest in challenging teachers' national pay negotiating system but it may have to if it wants to encourage and retain the best. At least it now knows that the quantity of teachers is much less important than their quality. Ms Tolley says the Hattie research will have a profound influence on schooling. Let us hope so.
