It is good that the first thing we hear from the Opposition in the new year is a constructive suggestion. National's education spokeswoman, Nikki Kaye, proposes a bill to require primary and intermediate schools to teach children a second language.
Each school would have to choose at least one language from a list of 10. The list would include te reo Maori and NZ Sign Language but the rest of the options could be varied by ministers of education.
The obvious difficulty, quickly heard from school principals, is, where are the teachers? Many schools are struggling to find enough qualified teachers to offer the curriculum as it is. Education Minister Chris Hipkins can dismiss this challenge if he is so minded, by asking why National allowed a teacher shortage to reach this point. But it is to be hoped he responds in a better spirit. He is being offered bipartisan agreement on an important step in education.
Most importantly, it could put to rest the contentious issue of "compulsory" te reo lessons. Kaye said, "We need to legislate for this, it's not an optional thing to provide that access to languages, and that is a big shift as a country." There are few options in primary and intermediate school, education at those levels follows a national curriculum and it would always have been absurd, as well as offensive, to treat the learning of te reo as something from which a parent could insist their child be withdrawn.
Schools have quietly moved well past that debate. Some te reo is now taught in at least 95 per cent of primary and intermediate schools, up from 79 per cent in 2000. The improvement has occurred despite a chronic shortage of teachers of the language, but children are getting only a smattering of the language that is unique to this country, passed on by teachers who have learned a little of it in their general training.
