John Roughan: Get honest about school closures

COMMENT

As we drove along a back road in the Catlins at New Year, towards a long-closed country school where my father had once taught, he suddenly mentioned something I'd never heard from him before.

The school hadn't been a good career move for him, he said. It was his first country posting and he found himself in a two-teacher operation with a senior colleague who was really more interested in fishing.

In the mornings the head teacher would sit yarning about the district's fishing spots and his fortunes with the rod, while the clock ticked towards 10am and the kids continued to play outside.

It fell to the young assistant to keep gently suggesting they ring the bell and get classes underway. Dad shuddered at the memory. It was clearly not the only educational corner cut there.

He left after the requisite two years and went to another school in the Southland countryside where he was in charge and we lived for a contented five years. That school is functioning still.

I raise this not to suggest that schools always deserve their fate in the periodic adjustments to population drifts, but merely to attest that not all schools are well run and not all closures ought automatically to be lamented.

I don't know how the losers were chosen for the latest cull, which was suspended this week when the Cabinet discussed another opinion poll. I've read the Ministry of Education's explanatory publication and I'm none the wiser.

It tells endangered communities, "Your school is part of a network review". Which means: "The ministry has identified a need to reorganise the way schooling is provided in this district." The network review is to "consider the issues".

What issues? What are the criteria for survival?

In search of an answer you wade through pages of soft soap about how you will be consulted and how a review proceeds from ministry proposal to ministerial decision with a ministry facilitator appointed, reference groups set up to monitor the process and submissions welcomed, of course, at points along the way.

If you are on one of the school's boards you are warned about "the range of feelings" you will have to deal with and that staff and others may need workshops on managing change or counselling during the process.

Once the fatal decision has been made an "implementation" stage kicks in, complete with another reference group, a project manager, a change manager and closure managers.

When you emerge from this froth you will still not know how a school is selected for the chop and what the community could yet do to keep it. The answer, of course, is nothing.

When all the consultation and palaver is done, the decision will be made in Wellington. Need it be? That is the question that should occur to everyone now that the cull is frozen for five years.

If the Government is serious about reviewing its method - as distinct from simply kicking the issue safely beyond its remaining life - it might conclude that its method of central direction could hardly be couched in gentler terms. But since soft soap doesn't fool anybody, why not try honesty?

If local people are to be offered a say in the shape of their schooling, make it real. Let them make the final decision with their feet.

If schools were set up like any other service industry, including social services - if schools were set up like primary health organisations, for example, or indeed like "integrated" private schools now - they would be independent professional businesses competing for pupils who each carry a public grant.

When district populations declined there would be no need then for the educrats to come down from Wellington with their facilitators and reference groups like wolves in sheep's clothing for an arbitrary cull.

Long before the ministry's attention was drawn to the capital waste in districts of dwindling numbers, the schools themselves would have had to adjust to falling income - by each making itself more competitive, merging with a more successful neighbour or closing of its own accord.

There would be no wailing communities, no staff in need of grief counselling, no change agents, submissions or any of the palaver the ministry publishes. People would have gravitated to the schools that did most for them and their locality.

They would have made the decision as they know they never can when invited to official consultation exercises.

You would think a Labour Government would go for a system that actually empowers public service consumers. The Blair Government does. But ours is loaded with ex-officials of the teacher unions, a breed that cannot abide the prospect that parents and pupils might hold more sway.

Whenever someone raises the possibility of parental choice, the unions argue the choice is illusory. Schools, they say, select pupils rather than the other way around. But that would be true only for as long as it took the supply to match the demand.

If all schools depended on it for financial survival, they would quickly adopt the style and character people seek.

The true reason this frightens the teacher unions and their Government is that both rather like central power over public services. Ask Dame Susan Devoy, who thought district health boards actually made decisions when she agreed to sit on one.

In any case, this Government's view is now academic. It has lost its nerve for anything contentious and when that happens a Government is finished. It's over to Don Brash.