Education policy Q&A: Bill English

Bill English says the professionals in the classroom know better than bureaucrats or politicians. Picture / Dean Purcell

The Herald invited politicians to answer questions at a range of policy forums - yesterday the focus was on transport. Today we examine education.

Below are edited highlights of the 45-minute question and answer session with National spokesman Bill English.

What would National do differently in education?

We will set clear standards because there's confusion about that across the board. In primary schools, we want to be clear about the standards for literacy and numeracy and set national standards there, which don't exist.

In secondary education, we need to get the standards right in NCEA because the assessment is not working and it's not fair to the students, which will ultimately undermine the quality of it.

In the tertiary area, there's a massive clean-up job to do to ensure that we're getting value for money there.

Secondly, decentralising. We believe that the professionals in the classroom have the knowledge and the professionalism to make better decisions than bureaucrats and politicians about how the resources are used. So that's why we're going down the road of school bulk-funding.

Does clear standards mean tests for 7-year-olds?

No, it doesn't. We're not introducing national testing. Schools have a lot of data about students. They need to use that to enhance learning and not just leave it on the shelf.

Secondly, National believes that we need comprehensive coverage of the methods that are working in many schools. One way to do that is to set some national standards in existing tests and have schools report about their progress.

By standards I mean pretty simple measurements. For instance, what proportion of the children are reading at their chronological age? Some schools use that measure now and they're able to show that it was 60 per cent and now it's 70 per cent, and that's good.

Don't we need to have school zoning in Auckland so that the children can go to the local school?

Zoning is one version of an enrolment scheme to control numbers and we think it is just too rigid.

So we would go back to the 1997 or 1998 legislation, which gives you a better balance of the right of a child to attend their local school, whatever that means, and the opportunity for the community and the parents to have some say over the enrolment scheme.

At the moment they have no say. It's just decided by a bureaucrat in Wellington. Zoning is not a sustainable policy and we're seeing that happen in Auckland now.

Papatoetoe High School and Gladstone Primary in Mt Albert are going through the painful business of the zone shrinking. They have to take every child in the zone, so the only way to control the growth is to shrink the zone.

Well that changes people's views of the effectiveness of zoning, because they thought they had a right and then it was taken off them.

The other important issue is this. We can't give parents a whole lot of choice straight away because most schools are full. So the other elements of our policy on parental choice are quite important. We'll allow integrated schools to grow. We would restore the public subsidy to private schools back to where it was in 2000 because people can only have a choice if there's places to go to.

You've said you'll allow successful schools to govern schools which are failing. Could you explain how that works?

Traditionally, when a school is failing we have been willing to take years to turn it around. That can be a whole generation of students.

We're not willing to wait that long. We are interested in getting the expertise of other schools and transferring it to see if that's a quicker way of righting a ship.

If you take Glenfield College, for instance. There's a statutory manager in there and an expectation she'll be there for two to 2 1/2 years. The community would like to see a board back in charge of it, but the Government hasn't taken that step yet.

So, for instance, Rangitoto College or Westlake down the road could step in and run or help to run that school for a couple of years?

Yes, it's possible. Whether they want to, of course, is up to them.

It's quite a radical idea, isn't it?

No, I don't think it is that radical. The current legislation allows for one board to run up to five or six schools. I've got in my electorate three schools, 60km apart, a 60km triangle, run by one board with vigorous site committees and strong parental support, quite successfully.

Is Mr Mallard right to start rationalising a lot of the smaller rural schools?

Well, he hasn't done that. What he's done is close down very good provincial city schools and that's why the network review process is completely discredited in, for instance, Timaru and Invercargill. Some schools that weren't doing so well got closed, but most of the kids were in highly successful schools that were shut down to fill other classrooms and that's the wrong reason.

You've often said that you're going to overhaul NCEA. How exactly?

The assessment has to be credible, fair and consistent. Plenty of other countries have dealt with these issues. There are well-established solutions and we should adopt some of them.

The second thing we need to do is to trim the size of NCEA. I think the schools have a genuine issue about the administrative complexity and the workload.

Do you disagree with Labour's strategy of trying to say "We need fewer lawyers and more scientists and we will therefore run the tertiary system accordingly"?

Labour's strategy is a train wreck and whatever they set out to do they achieve the opposite, which was an explosion in low-relevance, irrelevant, low-value courses. It has discredited the whole notion that you can devise a bureaucratic mechanism to steer every detail of the system. They've wasted hundreds of millions of dollars on the way through.

We need to get the incentives right, so the institutions are headed in the direction we want, such as more trades and skills, and keep the quality bar high because Labour just dropped it. There's no real quality floor.

What about the Wananga?

The Wananga needs to be brought back under control and the Government has belatedly started doing that. The Wananga has done a good job of getting large numbers of people into education who wouldn't otherwise be going near it and who no one else was interested in, but it's paid far too much for it.

So it needs to stop growing, probably shrink a bit.

It needs to take time to develop its internal systems so it can guarantee the quality of what it's doing.

You got gazumped on student loans, didn't you?

No, I think Labour went too far. We believed there was a case for helping students with their debt and we put up a moderate policy, one that was fair, in our view, to students and to everyone else who has to pay the interest that the student doesn't.

Labour's policy created some initial euphoria but I think most people have come to the conclusion that interest-free is a recipe for irresponsibility and bad behaviour.

It's created quite a lot of resentment among the majority of voters who don't have tertiary qualifications and student loans and wonder why they're now expected to pay all the interest.

Would National pursue a values curriculum?

Values have been in the curriculum for about 12 years, so it's nothing new. We don't believe, though, that the ministry or the Government should be running round compiling a list of values and then imposing those on schools.

The list which they've put up ranges from common sense through to code words for political correctness.

If schools want to adopt a programme there are a dozen very good programmes out there that they can pick up.

They don't need the bureaucrats in Wellington putting together something that's so vague it will mean nothing, but provides cover for people who want to push political correctness and social engineering in our classrooms.