Education Policy Thoughts Part 3:

Education cannot be used as a political football. National Standards 2.0 and test, test, test is not the answer. In fact, the 15-year-olds Mr Luxon refers to as failing now had five years of National Standards schooling. If their system was so good, why are the children who were a product of that system not excelling now?

I have a team of 34 teachers who are completely committed and totally dedicated to,  as Mr Luxon puts it, doing their best for every individualised child.

They know exactly where each child is at, and what will work best for that child, and they will do everything they can to overcome the numerous challenges that each child in their care faces to bring them to the standard of learning that child is capable of.

What Mr Luxon is proposing will destroy creativity, destroy teachers’ passion, destroy children’s spontaneity and love for learning, and narrow the curriculum.

Mr Luxon admitted this is what happened with National Standards, so he will ‘fix’ that by changing the tests, he says.

I have been to the USA a few times - at the invitation of Apple and after winning a scholarship that sent me to Harvard and allowed me to visit many schools.

I saw a curriculum narrowed to just three subjects - reading, writing, and maths.

It was depressing and soul-destroying for children and teachers. It was done because they had twice yearly, high-stakes testing that their school funding was directly tied to.

The outcome of this was that student achievement went backwards. If this approach is such a brilliant idea, why hasn’t America shot to the top of the student achievement league tables?

This policy completely ignores the systemic problems within society that have got to be addressed - child poverty is a huge problem. If children are hungry and cold, if mum is not sending them to school because there is no kai to send them with, or nothing to put on their feet or to keep them dry from the rain, or if they haven’t slept because a dozen people are living in the house - how is this policy going to help them. We know the huge problems we face with mental health, poverty, and crime - all on the rise - and children are found right in the middle of all of them daily.

In our school, more than half our 700 children are English Second Language speakers. We have children starting at five who are pre-verbal. Two of our new senior school enrolments do not speak a single word of English.

We have numerous children who are not yet toilet trained. I wonder how testing these children twice a year helps them do better. Perhaps Mr Luxon could tell us how to test pre-verbal children?

There is so much support, resourcing and help needed for these children - and a national repository of copy-and-paste lesson plans is so far from the answer. It would be laughable if it was not so desperately sad.

My team and I give our heart and soul to this profession and these beautiful young children. We live the job. We don’t ever switch off completely.

In my opinion, Mr Luxon, in what he is proposing, is being disingenuous - teachers and teaching are easy targets. Addressing the systemic societal issues that make teaching an all-consuming, incredibly demanding, tiring and stressful job is what is really needed, but that would cost so much more than the ten million they are proposing to cover teacher registration.