Editorial: Policy would put education back on track

An education manifesto outlined by the National Party this week could be its most important policy at the forthcoming election. No other policy is likely to illustrate the difference between the major parties so sharply. The difference is that in almost all Government activities Labour under Helen Clark has reverted to a more centralised command of public services while National would prefer those services to be shaped by consumers' decisions.

In education the Government has abolished bulk-funding to reduce the autonomy of school boards, reintroduced zoning to limit competition for pupils, capped the state funding and permitted roll-growth of independent schools, channelled preschool funding to public and "community"-run preschool centres rather than private providers and likewise favoured public tertiary institutions over private training centres. Generally, it has made schools and universities more answerable to a vastly enlarged Wellington bureaucracy that governs by assumed political wisdom rather than parents' or pupils' preferences.

That entire programme was in line with the desires of the teacher unions and probably most of the profession who fiercely resisted competitive trends in education when National was in power in the 1990s. Much of what National now proposes is a resumption of those policies, but in one important sense it would go further. It proposes to not only restore competition for pupils but it would permit strong, sought-after schools to take over weaker schools nearby. This is an idea as logical as it is exciting. It has the potential to improve education for everybody simply by meeting popular demand. It will be fiercely resisted again by educationists and politicians who believe they, rather than lay people, understand the greater good.

National proposes to give a great deal more independence to "schools which have established a reputation for excellence". They would be set up as community trusts with legal ownership of their property, the right to borrow against their assets and expand as they wish, perhaps taking over weaker schools in the vicinity. National has not said precisely how schools would establish a reputation for excellence and qualify to become "trust schools", as they might be called. Presumably any school that cannot accommodate all the pupils wishing to attend it could be given the powers to borrow and expand.

That seems infinitely fairer than today's system in which schools in high demand have to declare a zone of preference and entry to the school depends largely on the ability of a child's family to afford the enhanced real estate value of the zone. As National leader Don Brash put it: "One of the great ironies of our supposedly egalitarian education system is that only the rich get to choose where their children go to school."

Under the policy he outlined on Wednesday, some zoning would remain, to ensure all pupils had a right to attend their nearest school if they chose, but the ability of reputable schools to take over weaker ones could remove the need to move into a more expensive zone. There can be no principled objection to that. The objections that will be heard are motived instead by employment interests and professional power. Teachers are fearful of a system that would require them to negotiate with autonomous boards rather than a national employer, though competitive schools would probably have to pay a good deal more for teachers they wanted to attract and keep.

The present set-up serves the interests only of poor to mediocre employees and the power of educational theorists to prescribe policies such as the NCEA. Education, like any other industry, serves people best when the imagination and ambitions of its providers are checked by the need to compete for customers. National's proposals would put public education back on the right track.