Trevor Mallard: Quantity does not always equal quality in learning

COMMENT

The Government is investing massively in ensuring our schools provide quality teaching. Labour, unlike right-wing thinkers such as the Maxim Institute and the National Party, is not prepared to sit back and watch market forces rip into schools and destroy the quality of children's education.

The Maxim Institute's Paul Henderson claimed the Government was silent on education when the reality is that this fundamentalist right-wing think tank is deliberately not listening to what it is saying.

The review of schooling networks in areas around New Zealand is actually about ensuring that our children continue to receive a sustainable quality education in the face of projected population decline.

Over the next 15 years, we are looking at a drop in the primary school-age population of 60,000 children, according to the latest Statistics New Zealand projections. Some areas are going to be hit worse than others.

I want to see teaching resources spent on teaching and learning, not on maintaining the empty classrooms and buildings already resulting from population decline.

The network reviews are about ensuring this will happen. Savings from the reorganisation of school networks go back into local education. Unlike National's approach, which simply sucked the savings back to the Treasury in Wellington.

If schools start collapsing because of forecast population decline, if they start fighting each other for pupils, if it becomes hard to attract teachers into an area - students and their community will suffer.

It is essential to plan from a position of relative strength.

There has been a lot said about parental choice.

Quantity does not automatically equate to quality. Just because there are lots of schools does not mean the education they all provide is quality education.

What's more, there are no guarantees that the education they provide in the future, in face of population decline, will continue to be of a high standard.

And, ironically, as schools are left to die, quality choices for parents decrease beyond anyone's control.

It is clear to anyone who has visited Wainuiomata this year that parents have voted massively in favour of last year's changes.

The secondary school roll will top 1000 next year, way up from the 700 students who would have attended the two schools the community saw as failing, and which were merged as a result of the review.

Improving the quality of teaching to help lift students' achievement is a key priority, and we are focusing on the evidence about what makes a difference for children - that is, what works, rather than what is fashionable, feels good and works in theory.

Between individual schools and the Government, about $120 million is spent each year on professional development and advisory services. I am working, through a careful exercise, to realign this spending so it reinforces what we now know makes a difference.

An OECD report last year showed that our best 15-year-old students are, on average, among the top OECD achievers in literacy, that overall New Zealand is third in the world in literacy, but that we do have unacceptable disparities.

That's why one of our two top education priorities is to reduce the underachievement that students in some parts of the education system are experiencing.

During its time in government, National halved the operational funding for resource teachers of reading, cut reading recovery funding in many areas, and cut funding to successful after-school education programmes. We are now seeing the results of those cutbacks.

The Government has reinvested in literacy, an extra $15 million in the last Budget alone to appoint specialists to work with schools on their literacy programmes.

The Assessment Tools for Teaching and Learning, developed by the Government and Auckland University, is attracting international attention because it allows teachers and parents to know more clearly students' strengths and weaknesses in literacy and numeracy and how to build on those strengths and address weaknesses.

The NCEA now also gives parents and students much more detailed information. Previously students received an overall English mark; now that is broken down into reading and literacy skills.

The NCEA is popular with students, parents and employers because of the richness of the information it provides compared to the old system.

Many schools now target teachers' professional development on the basis of issues identified through these much more transparent results.

Right-wingers or whingers like the Maxim Institute would prefer that parents, teachers and students were kept in the dark and left to shuffle aimlessly through the schooling system.

Their ignorance is not for the Government.

* Education Minister Trevor Mallard is responding to Paul Henderson's view that the Government is intent on taking power from parents and communities.