A breath of fresh air for schools

The early signs are good for the government review of Tomorrow’s Schools.

It seems some common sense is coming through in the early discussion of the direction this should go. Comments from Education Minister Chris Hipkins and the review leader Bali Haque have identified the deeply damaging “winner and loser schools” created by Tomorrow’s schools. No prizes for guessing the winner schools are in high-income areas and the loser schools are in our lowest-income communities.

The reforms were introduced by Labour in 1989 after the Lange-Douglas government asked businessman Brian Picot to come up with a new schooling model. Of course it was a market model of education based on competition between schools – an integral part of the neoliberal reforms of the 1980s, designed to ultimately privatise all schools.

From Day 1 it was a disaster. Just as predicted.

Schools in high-income areas with their relatively privileged students were seen as more desirable with their better exam results. Schools in high-income areas rapidly grew while schools in low-income areas struggled with rapidly falling rolls. Through the 1990s National funded only roll growth so schools in high income areas got new buildings and fantastic state of the art sports facilities etc while schools in low income areas were run into the ground – starved for funds (the operations grant for schools was frozen for many years by National to drive “efficiencies”), demoralised and hung out to dry.

It’s worth noting that some schools in low income areas appeared to do very well and its worth taking time to look more closely at the best example of this – Avondale College in West Auckland with Phil Raffles as principal. Raffles claimed to have exam results which defied the predictions for a school in a low-income suburb.

The reality was very different.

What Raffles did was write directly to parents of high achieving students from across a wide area of west and central Auckland (with the support of some primary school principals) to invite them to come to Avondale for the best education etc. Many parents did shift their high-achieving kids to Avondale and the school roll rocketed while Raffles attacked the surrounding schools as useless and having low expectations of students.

This was Tomorrow’s Schools in action.

The predictable result was that students from well outside Avondale dominated the top stream classes while the local Avondale kids struggled at the other end of the school. To prevent many of these local kids from polluting his exam results Raffles would not let them sit school certificate exams and they were taught in H block (referred to by other kids as the handicap block) and did a non-exam course.

Local parents fought for their kids to be allowed a proper education but Raffles refused. Angry parents called a meeting at the school held in the school staffroom. Raffles gate-crashed the meeting and wanted to speak but furious parents ordered him out.

Some parents took their children out of the school. One mother I knew whose daughter was refused the chance to do school certificate at Avondale took her to enrol at Massey High School where she passed three SC subjects and went on to do well in the senior school. Several years later, out of the blue this mum phoned me to let me know her proudest day was when her daughter graduated with her nursing degree. She thanked me for the small amount of support I was able to give those parents at Avondale.

Throughout the whole saga at Avondale Raffles was the darling of the media and the Education establishment would not call him out. Avondale received glowing Education Review Office reports while schools in low-income areas generally were castigated as failing their students.

Throughout this sage too the Labour Party was silent. The local MP Johnathan Hunt quietly spoke to me once to say how good it was I was challenging Phil Raffles in public and that I should keep it up – all the while keeping his own head down and refusing to stand with deeply distressed local parents against the local bully – Raffles.

Looked at more broadly the notion of “choice” for parents through Tomorrow’s Schools of course proved empty. It was not the parents who chose the schools for their kids but the schools who chose the students they wanted to help enhance their reputations. Popular schools enrolled the whitest and the brightest students (aside from enough brown faces to make up a decent rugby team) while the rest were turned away.

It has taken Labour a long time to acknowledge the failure of Tomorrow’s Schools. I think it’s probably only possible now because the Labour politicians from the 1980s such as Phil Goff, Lianne Dalziel and Annette King have left parliament. While they were there it was too difficult. It would be nice to think the same recognition of failure would extend to Labour’s economic policies but here Labour is terrified of its own shadow.

The changes needed to Tomorrow’s Schools won’t be easy because the “winner” schools will fight them. Already the Auckland Grammar Headmaster is leading the right-wing charge to fight changes to which would reduce his ability to act like a private school.

But the early signs are good. Watch this space.