Debbie Te Whaiti: Gap will widen between haves and have-nots

Opinion

The National Party's proposals for bulk funding, "trust" schools and more funding for private schools will increase the divisions between the "have" schools and the "have not" schools, and have little impact on student performance.

The reality is that most schools won't get more funding under National but less, because the party will divert money from lower-decile schools to a few trust and private schools.

In proposing trust schools, the party will give a few schools that like to call themselves elite, in Allan Peachey's words, "the same degree of independence as private schools".

They will have full Government funding, no financial restrictions, the right to cherry-pick the best students, the ability to gobble up poorer-performing schools and, I imagine, the right to charge students whatever fees they like.

National's pledge that it will commit a reasonable level of capital costs to allow these schools to expand confirms that this is taxpayer-funded privatisation at its worst, and that the most disadvantaged schools will be stripped of their funding.

A Herald editorial labelled this idea "as logical as it is exciting", but among all National's proposals it is hard to think of anything more wacky.

If schools want to go private, that's fine, but why should the taxpayer subsidise them? Does that mean we'll have to bail them out when their expansion plans result in cost overruns and budget deficits?

In reality, these "elite" schools don't want to expand. Who would kill the goose that lays the golden egg? It's like Rolls-Royce producing cars for the mass market. It doesn't because it dilutes the brand.

In Britain, the Labour Government boasts it is "allowing popular schools to expand more quickly and more easily". But there is no enthusiasm for it.

A Times Educational Supplement survey this year revealed that two-thirds of the so-called top schools would not expand and only one in six were definitely considering it.

Significantly, many principals were opposed because of the impact on other schools (interestingly, unlike in business, there is still a collaborative culture in education). They feared that their expansion would turn others near them into sink schools, strip them of their best pupils and resources, and leave them with only the most vulnerable and challenging youth.

In business, causing your competition to collapse may be regarded as a positive outcome. But most communities would not agree that the collapse of their local school would be a positive outcome of National's "choice" and privatisation policies.

Although there is nothing to suggest that very large schools automatically underperform, expansion can result in overcrowding, and more classrooms will be squeezed on to existing sites.

It may tie up too many school resources running multi-campuses in different parts of a city. And despite National's capital cost pledges, if the expansion results in budget deficits, students and their parents will pay through higher fees.

Most education professionals can also see that bulk funding will have the same impact as trust schools - eventually meaning less funding and forcing schools to raise even more from student "donations" and risky ventures in the international student market.

Don Brash notes that a single funding grant is the way that tertiary institutions and most early childhood centres are already funded, but fails to acknowledge that under bulk funding these institutions have been forced to constantly raise students' fees, contributing to a growing social and economic debt to New Zealand because our best and brightest must go overseas to pay off their loans.

It is ironic that the party which supposedly stands for choice would also make bulk funding compulsory - against the wishes of the vast majority of teachers, schools and communities.

Dr Brash and his education spokesman Bill English should know by now that schools want more funding, not bulk funding. Numerous studies show that most schools are struggling to deliver a quality curriculum on their bulk-funded operations grant alone.

Later this year, the Post Primary Teachers' Association will release its own plan for enhancing secondary education over the next decade. Its contribution will empower future generations, open up opportunity, enhance equity and ensure all our children have a better future.

Parents won't be fooled by Dr Brash's pledges to do that because his policies simply cannot. They haven't forgotten the mess that National's privatisation agenda made in the 1990s - Air New Zealand, railways, electricity. And the social deficit we are still paying.

Dr Brash may profess some understanding of business but he has little understanding of what it means to be a society rather than an economy. A decent society takes care of its communities and its children.

Part of that is ensuring there is a cohesive national education system resourced to deliver good education to everyone's children, not just the children of the rich on Auckland's North Shore.

But let's be fair to Dr Brash. He has given voters a real choice in education policy: good schools for all New Zealanders, or more taxpayer-funded private schools for the children of the wealthy.

* Debbie Te Whaiti is president of the Post Primary Teachers' Association.