Headline: Opportunity for all through education
A child born today will leave school sometime between 2029 and 2032, give or take a year. What will the world look like then?
What technological advances will have transformed our lives in the meantime?
What are they going to need to know and be able to do in order to succeed in the world that they’re going to live in?
Those are pretty daunting questions, but then again, they always have been.
As a kid I remember watching Michael J Fox in the movie Back to the Future II.
Set in 2015, the young Marty McFly got around on a hovering skateboard, while his parents drove around in cars that flew. They didn’t quite get those bits right.
But the film did depict flat screen TVs on which we could watch multiple channels, hidden cameras and head mounted displays, all of which have become reality, but all of which were pretty radical ideas back in 1986.
The point I’m trying to make is, we have no idea what the world today’s babies are going to inherit will look like. And that’s a huge challenge for our education system.
We do know that knowledge is multiplying at a phenomenal rate.
In 1965 the co-founder of Intel, Gordon Moore, prophesised that the power of the computer would double every two years. A few years later, scientists managed to get 2030 transistors on one integrated silicon circuit, the result being our first pocket calculator.
Today we can get 2 billion transistors onto a solid-state chip, and by 2021 we’re expected to get 28 billion transistors per chip.
We can now store all the world’s information and make it available in almost any form to almost anyone in the world, almost instantly.
Knowledge memorisation and recall is no longer king. Ability to access, filter, and interpret knowledge is far more important.
We need an education system that prepares young people for the world they are going to live in, even though we don’t know what that world will look like.
While we can’t predict the future, we can predict the types of skills and attributes that someone is going to need to get ahead in life.
They’re going to need to be flexible and adaptable. That means we need to equip them with the skills they are going to need in order to learn, unlearn, and relearn throughout their lives.
They’ll need to be problem solvers. That means we need to teach them how to look at a situation from a multitude of angles, gather and analyse a range of information, and make important decisions and judgments.
They’ll need to work with others. That means we need to ensure kids have ample opportunity to develop their interpersonal skills.
If you think these concepts sound familiar, it’s probably because they sit at the heart of the New Zealand Curriculum – a curriculum that is too often being undermined by competing government priorities.
Take national standards. Nobody doubts that literacy and numeracy are vitally important, but we need to recognise that different kids learn at different rates.
Labeling a 6 year old as ‘below standard’ because they aren’t reading at a level the government insists they should be by that age will do nothing for their self-esteem, nor will it instill within them a love of learning that will stay with them throughout their lives.
The child’s teacher, ever eager to avoid being labeled below standard themselves, will be focused on ensuring that as many of the kids in their class as possible are jumping the government’s arbitrary hurdle, even if that means focusing all their attention on the children who are just below the line, to the exclusion of those who are well behind and therefore needing more intensive attention, and even to the detriment of those who are well above the standard and therefore in need of further challenging.
Those same teachers will be encouraged to focus only on those things that are going to be assessed, so subjects like art, music, drama, social studies and even science will be pushed to the back of the programme.
Unsurprisingly, the government will soon be able to trumpet an improvement in the narrow range of indicators it measures. It will be many years before the true cost of that improvement becomes apparent.
The current obsession with measurement and metrics is undermining what can and should be our world-leading framework for learning.
The New Zealand Curriculum recognizes that every child is different. We all learn different things at different times. Physically we all develop differently, and our brains are no different.
Some kids quickly take to reading, while others find logic or numeracy easy to master. Some kids love the creative arts, while others excel at physical activity.
Sticking labels on children as young as 5 isn’t the way we’ll bring out the best in them, and it’s not the way we’ll bring out the best in their schools and teachers either.
Ironically, I’ve found a lot of inspiration for my views on education in the 1930s and 40s, when Peter Fraser and Clarence Beeby spoke of all persons, whatever their level of ability, whether they live in town or country, having a right to a free education of the kind for which they are best fitted and to the fullest extent of their powers.
Fraser and Beeby recognized 70 years ago that the education system needed to focus on bringing out the best in every individual, and that to do so we need to recognise diversity.
The Labour Party is fully committed to returning to those values.
We want to redefine what success in education looks like.
Success means that every child achieves to their full potential.
Success means that every school is a great school.
Success means that we recognise and value great teachers.
Success means we celebrate diversity and difference.
Students engagement is critical to the success of our education system, and students are most likely to be engaged when they are enjoying themselves.
A huge barrier to student, and teacher, enjoyment is the over-bearing level of assessment we have within the system at the moment.
We are one of the only developed countries in the world that expects children to be formally assessed in every year of their primary school education, not even the US, the UK or Australia require that.
Three years of NCEA also puts our secondary system towards the high-end of the scale when it comes to the volume of assessment undertaken.
Assessment is vitally important, but we need to draw a clear distinction between assessment that is designed to further the learning process, and assessment that is intended as a ‘stocktake’ of progress.
Students are more likely to be engaged when they feel like they’re in control of their own learning. Learning that takes place in a context that a student can understand and relate to is far more likely to stay with them than something that is forced on them under duress.
Recently during Parliamentary Question Time, Hekia Parata stated that she was focused on “belting and bracing the education pipeline”.
After eighteen months of controversial school closures, attempts to increase class sizes, the introduction of privatized charter schools, and the unraveling of national standards, you could be forgiven for wondering just how much more belting the education minister thinks the system needs before she will consider it sufficiently braced.
A pipeline is entirely the wrong analogy to use when talking about education. If our schools really are a pipeline, what does that make the kids? They aren’t widgets churning off a production line; they’re unique individuals with different strengths and talents.
Schools and teachers should be focused on bringing the best out of each individual student, not trying to force them into conforming to a narrow and somewhat arbitrary definition of what a successful ‘product’ should look like.
It’s ironic that at a time when we’re constantly being told that we need to embrace creativity and innovation, the government seems hell-bent on driving those very characteristics out of the education system, and therefore, out of our young people.
National’s obsession with standardising childhood will lead young New Zealanders down a one-way path to oblivion.
So what will Labour do?
First, we’ll place the focus back on the New Zealand Curriculum and a broad and varied education.
Second, we’ll restore faith and trust in the teaching profession. No government can ever deliver on its educational goals by declaring a war on teachers as the present government has.
Third, we’ll recognise that there are factors outside the classroom that have a huge impact on a students readiness to learn inside the classroom. Tackling child poverty is going to be a central focus of the next Labour government.
Finally, we’ll return to an evidence-based approach to decision making in education. We need to make decisions based on what works, not what’s politically attractive and sellable.
An evidence based approach automatically immediately identifies a number of concrete steps we need to take.
The legislation allowing for Charter Schools will be immediately repealed. They’re an experiment based on ideology, rather than sound educational practice and research.
National standards will be abolished and replaced with a requirement for schools to report to parents in plain English a child’s progress in all areas of the curriculum.
League tables will be a thing of the past. If parents want to know how their school is performing, they can look at the school’s ERO report, a far more reliable indicator than shonky national standards data.
Professional development for teachers will be seriously overhauled, with a focus on proven programmes that are adequately resourced.
Barriers to learning will be identified and addressed, and that means tackling the looming resourcing crisis in special education.
There is no doubt that we face some big challenges, and prioritizing what to do, when do to it, and where any extra funding should go will be a big task.
The next Labour government will work collaboratively with those working in education so that we make those decisions together.
Our education system isn’t broken, it’s in great shape. Working together, I know that we can go from strength to strength.
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