MPs need nips and tucks not teachers

It must be so hard working in a job where you often get called rude names, are constantly being asked questions by people who don't know as much as you, while trying to ensure that you are understood.

Too many people want your attention and you cop the flack when you get it wrong. You put up with all this and, no matter how hard you try to please people, you will never be popular.

Then there is talk of cutting the numbers to save money, increasing the workload and introducing performance-related pay. Figures on the ratio per 100,000 have been discussed. Apparently reducing the ratio will not affect performance but will save up to $15 million a year that could be used for other priorities. If there are fewer of you and more of them - with a large proportion of people clearly not interested in participating or listening to what you have to say, then your job might disappear - what do you do?

Nothing - because this ratio is about politicians not teachers. A referendum held in 1999 had 81.5 per cent voting for a reduction in the number of MPs, from 120 to 99. The voter turnout was 82.8 per cent. Reducing the number of politicians per voter ratio was found to have no effect on outcomes but could bring huge cost savings. The evidence is there in countries with much bigger populations. Canada has one MP per 100,000 people, Australia has 0.7. (Perhaps the other 0.3 was away on a junket or dining with a lobbyist).

In contrast, we have the National Government, acting on advice from Treasury (economists not educators) deciding to reduce the teacher/pupil ratio on the basis of shonky evidence and against most parents' wishes. Their reasoning is that this will not affect outcomes for children.

Surely they know the education system is failing a huge number of kids? Can't they count? Kids are leaving school with no NCEA passes, many not able to read, write or do basic sums. Don't Cabinet ministers read the truancy figures? They must know about the young and unemployed, who have decided to opt out of doing anything? For this group of young people, school has been a failed exercise.

To keep this group engaged with the potential for learning and life requires more teachers not less. All children require time, attention and dedicated teachers who make learning relevant. To do this, the country needs more teachers and smaller class sizes. We see the outcomes of educational failure in our crime statistics, rising youth unemployment, dysfunctional families, anti-social attitudes and the disconnect of many young people from a sense of purpose and belonging.

The proposal to reduce the teacher/pupil ratio is the most socially destructive piece of policy the Government has mooted so far. It provides more proof of the genetic link to their mad cousins, the US Republican Party who seem determined to destroy their own country financially and socially, claiming it as a patriotic gesture.

Here the National Government seems intent on pursuing their ideology of cutting everything (except their own perks), demolishing the services that hold our social structure together and ignoring the aftershocks and ever-growing measures of inequality.

If the National Party and their allies feel so strongly that austerity is the way, then they should lead by example and reduce MPs' costs to the taxpayers before cutting education spending. That would teach them a lesson.

Terry Sarten lives in Whanganui. He is a parent, musician, writer and social worker. Email: tgs@inspire.net.nz