Bill English: Education voucher scheme simpler than it's made out

Voucher-funding does nothing to improve educational outcomes. It effectively privatises education, and results in vastly increased gaps between those who can afford to pay tens of thousands of dollars per year in top-up fees to enter former state schools - now elite schools - and middle-income families who live next door to those schools. The gap just keeps on getting bigger and bigger.

- Trevor Mallard, April 2004.

A voucher system is when the public money goes where the student goes. We already have vouchers in education. Every day New Zealanders aged from one month to 80 use a system hated by Government politicians and teacher unions.

Parents of a child under 5 can choose whether he or she goes to a community creche, a public or private kindergarten or a play centre.

The voucher has a different value depending on where the parents go - more at a public kindergarten, less at a private one. But if the child shows up, so does the money.

Tertiary education also runs on a voucher system. A student is required only to enrol and the money shows up. Anyone who meets entry criteria can go to any public or private tertiary provider.

In these sectors, parents and students have choices and they use them. They seem to like it that way. People make choices to fit their lives, not to make some ideological point.

Which university or polytechnic they attend will be influenced by where they live, where their friends or partners go, the costs of travel and the course and their perception of course quality. Which early childhood centre they use will be determined by opening hours, what parents think of the staff, where the child's friends go and whether it's on the way to work.

Funding follows the student in our schools, too. Any parent can enrol a child at any school that isn't zoned, and the money will follow the child. Recent figures have shown more and more are taking their children, and their funding, to integrated schools if they meet the entry criteria.

So parents use the choice, and not just for high-profile schools. In Timaru, 45 per cent of parents send their children past the nearest school. The balance of Timaru parents are also sending their children to a school of their choice - the nearest one.

Vouchers cannot be so bad if thousands of ordinary parents behave as if they have one. One of the reasons parents opposed mass school closures is that they reduced the choices they could make with their vouchers.

The closures are part of the Government's growing restrictions on where and how the voucher can be used. More than 400 schools are now zoned, from Auckland to Invercargill. No school is allowed to expand until all surrounding schools are full.

Under this Government, the value of the voucher has decreased each year if it is used at an independent school, dropping to about a quarter of what it is worth at state schools.

The restrictions are driven by a deeply held, left-wing prejudice shared by Mr Mallard that parents will make choices for the wrong reasons. He has said that real choice was when every school was a good school and every teacher was a good teacher.

That is daft. Parents do not and never will believe it. They shift suburbs and cities, take another job, or wish they could, to get their children to a preferred school.

There is so little relevant public information about school or teacher effectiveness that parents are left to decide how to use their vouchers for all sorts of practical and personal reasons Many, of course, believe the local school suits them and their children well.

So the voucher debate is simpler than it looks. Vouchers are not the big evil the Government and the teacher unions claim. New Zealand has a voucher system in early childhood and tertiary education, and for most schools. Where vouchers are allowed to work, they work by providing choice and lifting quality.

The financial differences Mr Mallard worries about happen right now. Schools pay for almost 4000 teachers outside the Government's central salary system. Many schools in better-off areas bring in up to $200,000 in community funds each year, though the Government won't release information about just how much.

The issue for debate is why parents are increasingly restricted in where they use the vouchers, and why some children are apparently worth less than others, depending on where they go to school.

Parents are not stupid. We do not send our children to school to fill the Government's classrooms, we send them to learn and to become good citizens. We cannot allow blinded ideology about vouchers to stand in the way of getting the best learning opportunities for every child.

* Bill English is the National Party spokesman on education.