The Dick Smiths Electronics School at Centre Bush?

I heard something terribly terribly sad today.

My old school in the UK - a 'Beacon School' not so long ago (a national example of excellent practice) has been forced to declare itself an academy (charter school) after the education board deemed it to be failing (their politically motivated 'standards'.)
It now operates under the governance of the Carphone Warehouse ! (All for the benefit of the pupils, of course!.....)
This makes me sick. Wake up NZ. Dont let this happen to us!
Schools are about people, not profit, or political ideology.

The Dick Smiths Electronics School at Centre Bush? It's a very real possibility.....

A taste of home...

This is so depressing.

For "Tory" read "National".
For "England" read "NZ".
For "OfSTED" read "ERO".

The following article was written in the Guardian (UK):

So much for all those treasured Tory principles. Choice, freedom, competition, austerity: as soon as they conflict with the demands of the corporate elite, they drift into the blue yonder like thistledown.

This is a story about England's schools, but it could just as well describe the razing of state provision throughout the world. In the name of freedom, public assets are being forcibly removed from popular control and handed to unelected oligarchs.

All over England, schools are being obliged to become academies: supposedly autonomous bodies which are often "sponsored" (the government's euphemism for controlled) by foundations established by exceedingly rich people. The break-up of the education system in this country, like the dismantling of the NHS, reflects no widespread public demand. It is imposed, through threats, bribes and fake consultations, from on high.

The published rules looked straightforward: schools will be forced to become academies only when they are "below the floor standard ... seriously failing, or unable to improve their results". All others would be given a choice. But in many parts of the country, schools which suffer from none of these problems are being prised out of the control of elected councils and into the hands of central government and private sponsors.

For five years, until 2012, Roke primary school in Croydon, south London, was rated as "outstanding" by the government's inspection service, Ofsted. Then two temporary problems arose. Several of the senior staff retired, leading to a short period of disruption, and a computer failure caused a delay in giving the inspectors the data they wanted. The school was handed the black spot: a Notice to Improve. It worked furiously to meet the necessary standards – and it has now succeeded. But before the inspection service returned to see whether progress had been made, the governors were instructed by the Department for Education to turn it into an academy.

In September last year the Department for Education held a closed meeting with the school's governors, in which they were told (according to the chair of the governors) that if they did not immediately accept its demand, "we will get the local authority to fire you, all of you ... if the local authority don't do it, we will. And we will put in our own interim board of governors, who will do what we say". The governors were instructed not to tell the parents about the meeting and their decision.

They did as they were told, partly because they had a sponsor in mind: the local secondary school, which had been helping Roke to raise its standards. They informed the department that this was their choice. It waited until the last day of term – 12 December – then let them know that it had rejected their proposal. The sponsor would be the Harris Federation. It was founded by Lord Harris, the chairman of the retail chain Carpetright. He is a friend of David Cameron's and one of the Conservative party's biggest donors. Roke will be the Harris Federation's 21st acquisition.

The parents knew nothing of this until 7 January, when 200 of them were informed at a meeting with the governors. They rejected the Harris Federation's sponsorship almost unanimously, in favour of a partnership with the local secondary school.

The local MP appealed to the schools minister Lord Nash, who happens to be another very rich businessman, major Tory donor and sponsor of academies. He replied last month: the decision is irreversible – Harris will run the school. But there will now be a "formal consultation" about it. He did not explain what the parents would be consulted about: the colour of the lampshades? Oh, and the body which will conduct the "consultation" is ... the Harris Federation. There is no mechanism for appeal. The parents feel they have been carpet-bombed.

Similar stories are being told up and down the country. Academy brokers hired by the department roam the land like medieval tax collectors, threatening and cajoling governors and head teachers, trying to force them into liaisons with corporate sponsors. Far from targeting failing schools, they often seem to pick on good schools that run into temporary difficulties. When standards rise again, the sponsors can take credit for it, and the "turnaround" can be claimed as another success. Ofsted iswidely suspected of colluding in this process.

Where threats don't work, the department resorts to bribery. Schools are being offered sweeteners of up to £65,000 of state money to convert. Vast resources are being poured by the education secretary, Michael Gove, into the academies programme, which has exceeded its budget by £1bn over the last two years. We are being pushed towards the policy buried on page 52 of the department's white paper: "it is our ambition that academy status should be the norm for all state schools".

Is this a prelude to privatisation? A leaked memo from the department recommends "reclassifying academies to the private sector". Just as Conservative health secretaries have done to the NHS, Michael Gove has published misleading statistics about our schools, to create theimpression that they are failing by international standards. They are not.

Neither truth nor principle stands in the way of this demolition programme. All the promises of the market fundamentalists – choice, competitive tendering, decentralisation and savings – are abandoned in favour of brutal and extravagant dictat. Thus the government creates a novelty: a capitalist command economy.

Twitter: @georgemonbiot A fully referenced version of this article can be found at monbiot.com

The ghost of Maggie lives on?

I am starting to see a worrying trend.

As a Principal, I worry about educational policy, but the penny has just dropped. The connection has been made. National Standards...Charter schools...Mighty River Power.....Miners' strike...

The government is systematically stripping the assets that are owned by everyone in our community (including schools) and redistributing those assets among the wealthiest members of society (and certainly those who fund their politics.)

Who will buy shares in State Owned Enterprises?
Who will reap the profit from charter schools?

The rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer.

The death of Maggie Thatcher is a timely reminder of my working class upbringing around the coal mines in South Wales in the early 80s....  I can't help but notice the same politics creeping into NZ.

Ill-conceived educational policy is just the tip of the ice berg.

"Its all about raising student achievement" - yeah right!

It is all about money.

I've tried very hard to keep these posts apolitical and focus on educational issues.

It's getting harder.

It is now becoming increasingly obvious that National Standards was really a rouse designed to destabilize the teaching profession in order to privatize schools so that corporates can make more money.

The global financial outlook is bleak. Education is big business. Keep an eye on the new business strategies of Bill Gates, Rupert Murdoch and others....all keen educationalists!

It is all about money (and Hekia should feature on the next Tui bill board.)

Charter Schools

The Finnish line?

Some facts about Finland’s education system, widely regarded as the best in the world. They decided to tackle social inequality before rubbishing their schools and their teachers....

Facts About The Finnish Education System

• All education is 100% publicly funded in Finland.
• All school materials (books, pencils, etc) are provided and are free.
• Dental and health care is free.
• Travel to and from school is free.
• Compulsory schooling starts the year the child turns 7 years old.
• Students have the same teacher from year 1 to year 6, then specialist teachers for the final 3 years.
• There is no testing until children are 15 years old.
• Only the core curricula are designed for nationwide application. They leave freedom for local education authorities to arrange teaching in the best way suited to local circumstances.
• There are no national standards.
• Every child is fed a hot 3 course meal every day at school.
• Every school has a doctor, a nurse, and a counsellor on site.
• Teachers have less student contact time and more teacher-teacher contact time.
• The schools day is shorter.
• School is 150 days per year.
• All teachers have a masters degree and a further teaching qualification.
• There are no school inspections in Finland.

Roger Moses - great article from www.stuff.co.nz

OPINION: From time immemorial, the world of education has been a crucible for polarised opinion and acrimonious debate.

More often than not, such debate has produced more heat than light, cleaving protagonists and antagonists into irreconcilable and bitterly warring factions. 

Most recently in New Zealand, there has been a vitriolic public outcry over class sizes, national standards and the prospect of so-called ''league tables'', a cliche that has its origins in the historic four divisions of the English Football League.

Fine if your team is Chelsea, Manchester United, Arsenal or Liverpool, but not quite so affirming for the ego if you happen to be a supporter of Accrington Stanley, Port Vale, Rotherham or Plymouth Argyle.

Advocates of league tables contend that parents and the community should be informed where one school rates in comparison to another. Such competition, the argument goes, will encourage schools, like football clubs, to improve their performance and lift the standard of New Zealand's educational offering. 

I may be wrong, but I sense such reasoning is linked to an assumption that the quality of teaching is pretty ordinary, and that this new-fangled approach will engender a long-overdue improvement in teacher performance.

"Could do better", of course, is an emotive phrase often applied liberally by armchair critics to the teaching profession in New Zealand as a whole.

For it to assume any real meaning, there needs to be an explicit comparison of New Zealand's educational outcomes with other countries, particularly those in the OECD.

The PISA (Programme for International Student Achievement) rankings, therefore, which compare national performance in reading, science and mathematics, provide a credible and widely accepted ''league table'' to which we should pay close attention. Conducted by the OECD, they represent an objective measure of our educational success in comparison with that of other so-called developed and developing countries and, by implication,  are indicative of the effectiveness of our teaching profession in New Zealand. A close perusal of the 2009 results provides some interesting food for thought.

In reading, New Zealand students rate seventh  out of 74. Above us are five Asian countries or regions: Shanghai-China, Singapore, Hong Kong-China, Japan and South Korea. The only Western-Hemisphere country to rank above us is Finland.  Below us are such countries as Canada, Australia, Britain, the United States, France, Germany and Sweden.  By any reckoning, the performance of New Zealand is in the top echelon.

In mathematics our performance is a little lower at 13th.  Here, we are headed by the similar group of Asian countries including Shanghai-China, Singapore, Hong Kong-China, Chinese-Taipei, Macau-China and Japan.  From the Western Bloc, we are shaded by Finland,  Liechtenstein, Switzerland, the Netherlands and Canada.  Notwithstanding this slightly lower ranking in mathematics, we still perform above Australia, Germany, France, Britain, the United States and Sweden.Our performance in science is equally outstanding. Once again, our students rank seventh behind four of the top performing Asian countries or regions (Shanghai-China, South Korea, Hong Kong-China, Singapore) and narrowly behind Finland and Canada of the Western Hemisphere.  As with our results in reading, we rank above Australia, Germany, France, Britain, the United States, Switzerland and Sweden.

Can we ''do better'' in New Zealand?  I am sure that we can. But any criticism of our education standards needs to be evaluated in a global context. Several of the ''Asian Tigers'' do feature above us, but at what cost to the overall development of their students?  At the risk of generalising, the pedagogical approach adopted in those countries tends to be highly teacher-centred and pressure-cookered, the very antithesis of the inquiry model promoted rigorously by the Education Ministry.

I suspect that a wholesale return to highly formalised, rote-learning, structured teaching methodology would have very limited appeal to students, parents and teachers in New Zealand.  Of the Western countries, Finland is often lauded as the zenith of educational achievement, a country where teaching as a profession is regarded highly and a model to which all should aspire.  It is unarguable  that Finland does produce stellar academic results, but a closer scrutiny of its demographic components is revealing. 

Only 3.4 per cent of its population is composed of foreign citizens, one of the lowest figures in the European Union.  Most of these are from Russia, Estonia and Sweden.  Finland's indigenous minority consists of only 7000 Sami, the small group who inhabit the icy wastes to the north of the country.  In short, Finland is perhaps the most homogeneous country in Europe, without many of the educational challenges that arise with either mass migration or the integration of large indigenous minorities.

Where does that leave our education system in New Zealand?  On the surface, our overall performance is quite outstanding.

However, there is widespread criticism that the performance of our "bottom 20 per cent" is very poor and a blight on the system. 

Simple logic, surely, would imply only two possible causes for that.

On the one hand, New Zealand teachers who perform outstandingly well with the top 80 per cent of our students for some inexplicable reason may be abysmally poor in teaching the bottom 20 per cent.  This could be true, but I have my doubts.

On the other hand, the performance of the bottom 20 per cent of our students may reflect a disturbing demographic reality in our country that has been exacerbated in recent decades, and is not reflected in countries such as Finland.  Intergenerational unemployment, a widening gap between the haves and have-nots, the challenges of redress for Maori, and the integration of new immigrants to our country are all major challenges that our country is facing.  Inadequate teaching, I would suggest, is not the cause of these deep-seated issues, any more than inspired teaching can be the sole panacea.

More effective teaching of disengaged students must be part of the long-term solution if positive change is to occur.  In the process, however, let us not ignore the fact that New Zealand teachers are doing a fine job and that they, alone, cannot right the deep-seated inequalities in our society.

Roger Moses is headmaster of Wellington College.