Editorial: Finger of failure points at ministry

Size does matter. When 80 per cent of the electorate says a loud "no", that number matters.

On the day the media reported results of an APN and Colmar Brunton TVNZ survey, both revealing a majority opposition to the Government proposal to increase class sizes, Education Minister Hekia Parata finally buckled to public pressure with a backdown.

The Government realised that pursuing such a policy would be severely detrimental to its popularity.

Power to the people? What took us so long? When the Government introduced National Standards into schools in 2010, parents were generally supportive. It sounded like good sense to tackle the much-quoted one-in-five children who were failing at school.

What many parents did not realise was that although National Standards have adequately highlighted students who are not measuring up, the Government has not provided schools with additional funding to move these children up the ladder.

As schools started to report their results from National Standards testing, the Government simultaneously tried to spin the crazy idea that to enable it to increase quality teaching in the classroom and focus on this tail of one-in-five children, it was necessary to cut education's most valuable resource - the teachers.

It suddenly became horribly clear - the madness of introducing standards, then undermining the initiative by slashing the means of achieving those standards.

Common sense told 80 per cent of the electorate that the smaller the class size, with a good teacher, the better the learning. Taking away teachers would have been disastrous for those children already disengaged at school.

Even in her backdown, Ms Parata does not admit that the ideology behind increasing class sizes is flawed - claiming changes would have been "modest".

The mistake in the first place was creating an either/or scenario between quality and quantity. Parata's policy implied our only choice was to have a large class, or a small class ruled by what she implied could be a "bad teacher".

Every profession has dead wood, but the overwhelming majority of New Zealand's primary and secondary teachers do a first-class job with ever-depleting resources. While it is encouraging that the Government has listened to parents, the principals, teachers and trustees across the political spectrum, it remains to be seen whether Parata - or her successor - will engage constructively with the sector to find a better informed, achievable, and affordable way of lifting student achievement.

It is not the children - or the teachers - who are failing at school, but the Ministry of Education which is failing the children.