Brooke van Velden: Kids deserve fair shot at education

OPINION:

“The Government’s objective, broadly expressed, is that all persons, whatever their ability, rich or poor, whether they live in town or country, have a right as citizens to a free education of the kind for which they are best fitted and to the fullest extent of their powers.”

So said Peter Fraser, Labour’s second and longest-serving prime minister, from 1940-49. For me nothing is more Kiwi than the simple idea that every citizen gets an equal shot at academic excellence.

The idea that a kid doing physics by correspondence at an Area School has as much chance of doing medicine as one attending King’s College is true Kiwi equalitarianism.

As one of Auckland’s leading principals told his community last month, not every Kiwi kid is getting that chance now. “Our literacy and numeracy rates have plummeted. On average 330,000 students are away from school each day. That’s 40 per cent of school-aged children not in school learning each and every day.”

He goes on to point out what this means for their results. “Last year 43,000 Year 12 students gained NCEA Level 2, the second rung in the NCEA qualification. Almost 20,000 did not. Some will try again this year, but many won’t and so will leave school with limited qualifications.”

And the results for the students any Labour government is supposed to help? “Only 18 per cent of Māori who turned 18 last year have the required qualification to enter University. In 2022 there were over 80,000 young New Zealanders (15-24) not in employment, education or training.”

What’s most puzzling is that today’s Labour seems to have forgotten all about Peter Fraser’s grand aim.

There’s been a lot of kerfuffle over Education Minister Jan Tinetti interfering with the release of school attendance data this year. She’s now in front of Parliament’s Privileges Committee. The question is whether she knowingly misled Parliament about her interference, or just didn’t know what her own staff were doing.

Education Minister Jan Tinetti. Photo / Mark Mitchell

The answer to that is a technical question for the committee, but where was her fire for equal opportunity? It seems like she was more interested in how the figures would look politically than the fact hundreds of thousands of children from poor households were missing their biggest chance in life, day by day.

Modern Labour are not only unaware of the problem, it’s like they don’t even want to know. It takes months for the Government to even report attendance data. The latest attendance data available is for Term 4 last year. It’s now June. Yet over 400 schools have not even reported their attendance in that data.

Every school should be required to report which students attended, by student number, daily. That would create a national focus on the problem, and government could start understanding the patterns in the data. Only then can the resources of government be brought to bear on the reasons students don’t attend.

When students get to school, they should encounter a knowledgeable adult teaching valuable academic knowledge from a prescribed curriculum. Right now there are rural high schools that struggle to field a single maths teacher. Where is the pathway out of poverty through education for kids in those towns, some of the poorest places in the country?

The curriculum should require real knowledge to be taught, in detail, to all. The dream of equal opportunity dies when elite schools are (understandably) shunning the national qualification of NCEA, leaving the rest to make do with mediocrity.

What is taught should be examined rigorously. The State of Mississippi has climbed from the bottom of the United States to the middle by insisting Year 3 students pass a reading test before they move on to the next grade. Tough? Perhaps, but not as tough as waving illiterate students through to another pointless year, only so they can be mugged by reality later in life.

After setting the standards, bureaucratic meddling needs to stop. For too long, the education bureaucracy has dumped on teachers with the latest fad. Take the so-called Modern Learning Environments.

For a decade the Ministry of Education told schools they could have any new classroom they like, so long as it is one of those big barns. You know, three teachers, 100 students, and lots of bean bags. Ambitious schools are now converting them back to proper classrooms with makeshift partitions. They could have been saved the time if the profession was treated as though they are experts doing the most important work for New Zealand’s future.

This week the news about education is that students are missing school for the latest reason in a long line lately. This time it’s school strikes. But when the teachers finally come back to school, bigger problems will remain.

Peter Fraser would not recognise Chris Hipkins’ and Jan Tinetti’s education system, but he had it right. If the next government can do one thing to secure New Zealand’s future, it is: return to the values of aiming high, trusting the profession, and giving every kid an equal shot at academic excellence.

Brooke van Velden, MP, is the deputy leader of the Act Party.