Alwyn Poole
Innovative Education Consultants
Dear Iona
Many readers will not have name recognition for you in your role as Secretary for Education in NZ.
I have noted that until last year all emails coming out from your officials had the footer: We shape an education system that delivers equitable and excellent outcomes. That footer doesn’t seem to be there any more, which at least is an acknowledgement that neither is even close to being true.
I process a database each year on the outcomes for school leavers from every high-school in NZ. This week I am using it to write a piece titled “How we keep the lower class poor and guarantee a low paid, low skill workforce”. I am comparing the top 10 high schools to the bottom 42. It is truly sobering. It is a bit like Fight Club though, isn’t it… we just don’t talk about that stuff.
What is even more sobering is that so little is being done about this. The purpose of this letter is to plead for more action and also to ask you and your senior team to get some situational awareness. The evidence that you have no sense of what is happening to ordinary people across NZ is in the first few sentences of your weekly Covid Update sent to school leaders across NZ.
This is what you stated to every school leader in NZ.
“It’s been an historic week domestically and internationally. Both the events at Parliament and in Ukraine are sobering. Both will have long-term effects.
I know these events will have impacted you, your staff, your tamariki and akonga directly, and they have also been felt throughout Aotearoa.”
That is abject nonsense and completely myopic Iona. Most schools and families in NZ will be aware of both events but barely affected at all – they haven’t got the time and energy to be. You are suffering, in your office high above the Wellington Harbour, from the delusion that most upper-level bureaucrats and politicians have: that Wellington is New Zealand. Kind of like when you ask a young child where the world is and they say, “It is in New Zealand.”
Here are some things that are truly affecting schools and students/families:
- Most schools are already rostering home year groups and doing hybrid learning – often very ineffectively. This is caused by a mix of a massive number of Covid cases in some areas, families and teachers being affected by the close contact isolation rules, and genuine teacher shortages caused by the ridiculous mandate. Many children have also become habitually completely disengaged from their schooling and education.
- Many schools are still trying to find out where a vast number of students who were on their rolls last year have gone.
- Schools in Auckland, Waikato and Northland are trying to think of strategies to get students up for assessments and exams this year after a 400% increase from 2020 to 2021 in students not sitting NCEA exams. Schools nationwide are worried about the drop in NCEA achievement overall last year – despite the bonus credits.
- Schools are trying to work out how to take students on camp and involve them all in sport. The Minister has said schools must allow unvaxxed kids to do both but all manner of facilities and camp activities still require vaccine passes. It is a mess.
- Schools are dealing daily with poverty and many are spending as much time sending out food parcels as they are trying to organise curriculum teaching.
- Regardless of Covid, full attendance at decile 1 – 3 schools is about 36%. As the evidence will show later this week, the high decile schools are progressing in all areas; the neglected low decile ones are in even more rapid decline. Where is the inspirational nationwide programme to get kids back into school? Is it still accurate that there are 10,500 school age children in NZ not on any roll – or has that gone up again?
- Schools with an interest in genuine equity are trying to figure out how to get their Maori and Pasifika, of whom less than 20% currently leave school with UE, up to the Asian levels of 69%. Have we given up on that because we hear so little about it? Maybe you could do a study about the success of a school like Manakura and disseminate the inspirational information.
- Many families are worried about food, employment, paying for uniforms, paying for petrol and looking after kids when they are forced to remain home. Many are living in motels or on the massive social housing wait list. Many are dealing with increases in violence in their communities as well as other criminal behaviour. Some families are moving numerous times a year, which involves changing school … if they ever enrolled their child after the last move.
- Kids are simply worried about their future. Have you noticed that statistics are showing a 60% increase in self-harm by young people? My guess is that it has nothing to do with the protests in Wellington or war in Ukraine.
- Many teachers are exhausted and it is only half way through term 1.
Most of this stuff is not reported in the media Iona. It doesn’t make the headlines. You have to go out there and find out.
In the last three years employment at the Ministry of Education has risen from approx 2,900 people to 4,000. You have some wonderful people doing huge amounts of work in schools on the front line. I am guessing, even though they are the most useful, they will be on the lower pay scales. What do the rest of your staff do?
I have three suggestions for your senior and middle managers to get some perspective.
1) Please put out an independently formulated survey to every school in NZ on the role and performance of the Ministry of Education. Schools have to face ERO every three years. Your people have no accountability. If you want to improve you need to know the perceived and actual effects of your work.
2) No doubt your senior managers have had to work remotely at times and will have gained a good online meeting skill set. Why not get the top 10 in your hierarchy to get some genuine situational awareness. Each should go to a more troubled part of NZ than their Wellington office and work remotely from there for 10 weeks while also documenting their experience of the local schools and social milieu. I genuinely think there is no downside to this and good things will come. You cannot know the level of desperation and need from plush Wellington offices and being in the political silo. Again, Wellington is not NZ.
3) If you are so concerned with Ukraine please take your top 3,000 bureaucrats and go to that country to help. Both countries would gain. Ukraine would appreciate it. NZ tax-payers would save $300m per annum in your salaries alone and I do not think the school system would miss you all at all. I would be happy to start a Give a Little to help with tickets and khakis.
Alwyn Poole
Innovative Education Consultants