Education Forum Should Focus On Helping Learners Who Need It

25 June 2012
For Immediate Release

Minister's Education Forum Should Focus On Helping Learners Who Most Need It

The education union NZEI Te Riu Roa today called on the Education Minister's newly convened education forum to focus on the real challenges to boosting success for students who are not achieving (the target group for making a difference), not on ideological agendas.

NZEI President Ian Leckie said New Zealand schools, teachers and students were top-performing ones internationally despite spending on education being lower than the OECD average. A serious focus on more investment in education and increasing resourcing to support students who are identified as under-achieving should be the priority issue for the forum.

"We believe the forum should work to develop and resource initiatives that already work well to lift the achievement of struggling students, as well as identifying new ways to support them," Mr Leckie said. "Schools know the children who are struggling; they know the programmes that work. But often there are simply not the resources to support the interventions such as reading recovery, specialist help and intensive 1:1 support that these children need."

He said the forum should not duck the hard issue of how to address the "out of school" impacts such as poverty, ill-health, family background, transience and ethnicity that play a huge role in student achievement. New Zealand ranks in the top 5 OECD countries in education, but is 20th out of 35 in terms of child poverty. He pointed to Australian schools, where all schools receive funding for a welfare officer to support children and their families.

Mr Leckie said resourcing practical measures that were proven to work made more sense than introducing league tables, performance pay for teachers or charter schools, all of which had failed to lift student achievement or teacher effectiveness in other countries.

He said NZEI would not engage with any process leading to student achievement data being made available to the public in the form of league tables, as such ranking created "winner" and "loser" schools, unfairly labelled schools, their students and communities as failures, and did nothing to lift student achievement.

ENDS

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