Teachers staunch but Tolley won't back down

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Sat, 20 Aug 2011 6:09p.m.

416 schools have submitted charters without them and now Tolley is cracking the whip

416 schools have submitted charters without them and now Tolley is cracking the whip

By Rachel Tiffen

Nearly two years after national standards were launched in schools, teachers are still fighting to expel them.

But Education Minister Anne Tolley is refusing to back down and is threatening statutory intervention for schools that refuse to comply.

Fronting up to this year's New Zealand Education Institute Conference, Ms Tolley got her usual rousing reception - a welcome so quiet you could hear a pin, or a tea-cup, drop.

Because despite the backlash against National Standards, 416 schools have submitted charters without them and now Ms Tolley is cracking the whip.

“The Education Act gives us some statutory interventions; we've already put those into place so we’re just working our way through them and we're getting close to the stage where the secretary of education can put in a specialist advisor or a statutory manager into a school.”

She says interventions might start before the election.

“The reality is we've got one in five kids who are failing in our system, I make no apology for saying I want those kids to be able to read and write and do maths.”

Ms Tolley is also promising to renew a popular policy that gives 20 hours of early childhood education to parents.

“It's a universal provision for three and four year olds, it's working really well and we don't have any intention to change it.”

And she says promising middle to high income families will not take the hit to fund it.

After a number of battles with unions over National Standards, it seems the Government has had enough conflict for now and is ruling out performance-based pay for teachers.

That leaves the Act Party room to roll it out as one of their new policies this weekend.

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Comments

11 Sep 2011 02:12a.m.

Bill wrote:

Is Education in NZ really as messed up as it appears? We went through this nonsense 15 years ago in Ontario (Canada) until the electorate turfed out the politicians whose main goal was to "make teachers pay" for the failure of their misguided education policies. Guess what, New Zealand? It won't work for you either! And our little corner of Canada has almost 5 times your population. Tell your politicians to stop buying into outdated and failed initiatives from Britain and the United States (now there's a country with a great education system) and start caring about the stakeholders. That includes the students AND their teachers.

25 Aug 2011 06:13p.m.

cherie wrote:

Private sector employees have to preform to keep their jobs.
Its about time schools were given the oppertunity to throw the bad teachers out.
Listerning to a principle on the raidio not so long ago I really felt for him.
He said he had two teachers who were woeful.
Woeful is that what we want?
Ann Tolley is not an idiot as Clarke puts it.
She has walked into a system that was hopeless and is trying to get a level set that can be tweeked and if it is not gained then more funds and help can be directed to help sort it. It is not much use giving schools who are doing fabulous the same as schools who are not but we need to identify them to be able to do this?
And yes if that means it shows a particular teacher to be found wanting then throw them out.

25 Aug 2011 05:08p.m.

Ryan wrote:

I teach at a University and National Standards is a joke. The students we get now are so underprepared and lack basic math and english skills (they don't even know how to calculate an average (or mean)). So now universities have to pick up the slack.

21 Aug 2011 05:50p.m.

Clarke wrote:

@Wolfman you have no idea what you are on about...only truely lazy parents blame teachers for their childrens failures. Parents have stopped being involved and its idiots like you who believe that teachers have to pick up the slack even though this government has quadrupled their paperwork. Many kids have failed in the school system in the past few decades, it doesnt matter what system is in place, there are kids that just dont want to be there... and parents who are too damned lazy to be involved who spend all their time blaming teachers. Teachers are the ultimate scapegoats for the truely lazy. National standards is the bigget idiot programme ever designed and it wont do anything to help those kids that are failing.. unless you think that actually sitting them down and telling them they are failures will help.

21 Aug 2011 02:06p.m.

Ruz wrote:

When John Key reshuffles his Cabinet after the November election, I predict that Tolley will not keep the Education portfolio.

20 Aug 2011 09:51p.m.

Henry wrote:

So maybe you should actually be spending money helping those one in five kids rather than wasting it by telling them they're failures then literally doing nothing else. This is a woman who has never been in a classroom in her life thinking she knows better than the hundreds and hundreds of teachers who have been teaching for years.

20 Aug 2011 08:18p.m.

Wolfman wrote:

The education system in this country sucks with lazy teachers who only care aboiut how much time they get off and how much money they get. They don't give a damn about the kids they are paid to teach. In my days, teachers took pride in their profession and I can't recall any kid leaving school that couldn't read, speak proper english, and could add 2 and 2 together. These days it appears if they turn up that is good enough. Maybe the education system needs to go back to basics so they can teach the kids the basic skills. Over the years politicians have raped the schooling system and the teachers have dumbed down the population, so what do we get? Kids leaving school who know nothing.

20 Aug 2011 07:54p.m.

Greg wrote:

This is clearly a case of those in the beehive thinking they know better than those at the chalk-face. It's quite clear they don't know better.

20 Aug 2011 07:44p.m.

ACCSUX wrote:

Yip wat a joke .. neither of these groups giv a stuff about the children , its all about them as always. For generation after generation they hav failed , failed to do there job ,failed to teach many. 70 percent leave school and dont earn the average wage, that's a fail teachers . as its your job to educate every child so they can earn enough to live on . nor can many read or write , thats a fail eduation department. as its your job to educate every child so they can earn enough to live on . only public servants could get away with failing to do there jobs. they hav already failed, many many children . basically they hav all already failed us all.

20 Aug 2011 07:12p.m.

Clarke wrote:

Tolley is an idiot, since she has taken over the education portfolio early childhood education has been all but destroyed, early childhood teachers now have no time to spend teaching your kids.. the paperwork has tripled in the last 3 years and the funding has been dramatically cut. Early childhood centres are also begginning to cheat the funding system, with many of the biggest providers writing down their non contact times as time on the floor so that their companies can reach the 80 percent funding threshold. Our early childhood programme is seen as the best in the world, but National are systematially destroying it and teachers because of excessive paperwork now have no time to spend teaching students. The same can be seen in all areas of our school system, recently a survey of developed countres showed that New Zealand children had some of the worst possible outcomes because of a lack of government spending on education, not enough time to spend with the kids. National are trying to institute a militant system designed to do nothing but repeatedly tell kids they are failures and the most likely outcome of that is that the kids will begin to believe it. Tolley and Key have no idea what is good for our kids, they are destroying the current system by hacking away its funding and increasing the workload phenominally.