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  SIMON National released its policy this week on compulsory school education. The policy advocates an end to zoning, the potential for successful schools to take over less successful ones and an overhaul of NCEA and the policy includes a controversial proposal to test seven year olds' literacy and numeracy. Associate Education Minister David Benson-Pope is with us now from Dunedin. Good morning Minister. DAVID Good morning Simon. SIMON NCEA's been under constant criticism what are you going to do about it, what changes are going to be made? DAVID Well there's a big difference in what the National Party have just said and NCEA issues, we've already taken some really good and welcome steps around the scholarship exam I think you'll be aware of that were welcomed by teachers and senior students. SIMON Well hang on I have to cut you short there, they weren't that welcomed were they, I mean John Morris has criticised the review, Principal of Auckland Grammar, Brent Lewis Principal of Avondale College, two of the most desired schools in Auckland, they said that you didn’t pay any attention to what they said. DAVID Well that’s not true, and they had representatives in fact John was a member of that panel himself, I don’t think he'd say that now, now that he's looked at the decisions, and I have to say that taking two very small minority of principals who have constantly been anti NCEA is not representative of the whole of the feeling in the sector. So let me carry on though to NCEA your original question. What we're really keen to do is wait for the results of the State Services Commissioner report this money and the end of next month and we'll take steps whatever might be necessary at that stage to help restore the confidence in the system that should be there. SIMON Those two principals I mentioned though are principals of schools that are in high demand, very very sought after schools so obviously the public thinks they're on the right track, they say that we need some more ranking of students as under the old system as opposed to the standards based assessment system. Are you irreversibly committed to standards based assessment? DAVID Oh I think the whole system, I'm not making a unilateral decision about this I want to work with the teaching and education community, parents and students to come up with the refinements, the evolutionary sort of refinements we need to NCEA, which inevitably will be required and we'll commit to, but I think we have a system that is a really robust system appropriate for New Zealand. Quite a statement that we're prepared to develop a system of our own and not rely on systems imported from our colonial past. SIMON One of the major criticisms has been that the NCEA results do not report failure. By not allowing for failure how then are we supposed to assess relative merits and success. DAVID That’s one of the issues I'm looking at, I'm really keen to address the issue. It's not as simple as you'd at first think, there's a perverse disincentive for people not to withdraw from things that they don’t sit for whatever reason and that caused a lot of difficulty with the robustness of the results this time, it's not as simply as it seems though, but it is one of the issues that I have asked the Leaders Forum to address and I think we need to acknowledge what people have entered or change the reporting system, but as I say this is a very complex issue and on balance considering the complexity of it the QA last time decided that what we have now is appropriate. I have also said that I want them to look at the grade point average because I don’t think that’s at all appropriate, it seems to have no statistical relevance and is a figure that’s not very useful at all. SIMON How concerned are you by the fact that so many schools and parents are opting out of NCEA? DAVID Oh I don’t think that’s true Simon, I got overwhelming support in a couple of schools I was in yesterday asking talking to senior students about their attitude to NCEA. It's interesting you ask that question when you've just had some pretty robust criticism of the media, as long as the print media in Auckland keep running to opponents of NCEA that’s what they’ll get said to them, but if they go to the majority of teachers and students that won't be the feedback they get. SIMON There does however seem to be a perception that we are ending up with two tiers of schools, NCEA and other. DAVID No, I know the overwhelming majority of our students and our teachers support NCEA, we just had the PPTA report that shows that support at overwhelming levels. Now I acknowledge there's work to be done and evolutionary improvement to be done and that’s what we're about, but we're going to continue to work with the education community to get the best outcomes we can for the young people in our classrooms. SIMON Let's go back to the principles of the knowledge wave, they highlighted a globalised economy demanding excellence, now how do you apply that to education? DAVID Oh you do that by providing opportunities for people to learn how to learn and not learn how to pass exams, and some of the work I saw at Kaikoura High yesterday gives me a great deal of encouragement and enthusiasm about what's happening in our schools. SIMON You brought up National's policy a few moments ago, what's so wrong with what seems to be its focus on excellence and competition? DAVID Oh nothing man, I'm focused on excellence and competition too, but you can't achieve excellence in schools if you don’t have teachers on your side and I think – I couldn't believe my good fortune when I read that speech because it highlights everything that’s the difference between Labour and National. We want to include people we want to work with people to get the best out of everyone for our future. The National Party in one swoop with one act has alienated pretty much every teacher in the country and that’s not me saying that, have a look at what teachers and organisations of principals and teachers have said nationwide for the last four days you know. I think actually the National policy is pretty much the last nail in its electoral coffin. No one in this country wants to go back to the 90s and that’s exactly where they want to take us. SIMON Well you’re talking about teachers not wanting to go back to the 90s as it were but we haven't actually asked about parents, but I want to ask you another thing. National proposes to give good sought after schools with good reputations the opportunity to take over weaker ones. What's wrong with that? DAVID Well if you sort of cut under the jingoism and the policy this is about privatisation and it's about privilege, it's what we often expect from the National Party. Perhaps the most telling things are what Dr Brash didn’t deliver in the final speech, the 50% increase of funding for private schools and also removing the statement that said there'd be no loser schools under the new National policy. SIMON Yeah but the proposal where the good schools can take over weaker ones, I'm gonna quote from the Herald's editorial yesterday. 'Has the potential to improve education for everyone simply by meeting popular demand'. DAVID Well I don’t think it does you see. Our attitude is on making sure really high quality education is available to all students irrespective of where they happen to live and that’s always been the focus. Being elitist and allowing schools that for whatever reason might be performing better at the time is no solution to that. SIMON But a good school taking over a weaker one has the opportunity to apply some of its successful applications. DAVID Well I'd rather work on all our schools and make sure they're all delivering education at the quality that our students deserve. SIMON Another question for you from yesterday's Herald, 'entry to high demand schools depends largely on the ability of a child's family to afford the enhanced real estate value of the zone' – and you only have to look at the Herald real estate section to see the number of references there to Grammar zone, ANI, EMPS, all this acronym soup that suggests people have value in their homes as a result of where they live in relation to a school, how can that be a fair system. DAVID Well that wouldn’t be a fair system but that isn't the system we have, there are plenty of high performing schools that are not in high value areas. SIMON Well that is the system you've got because you've got zoning. DAVID I think zoning's entirely appropriate. We have zoning because we want to guarantee that young people can enter their own local school. If you don’t have zoning you have the inevitable and very quick consequence of people living next to a popular school and not being able to get into it because the schools differentiate in who they admit and we just can't have that in the sort of fair society that New Zealand is. SIMON What's so wrong with allowing parents more choice in their children's education? DAVID Oh nothing. Parents have infinite choice, they have the choices to run the schools, they have amazing autonomy in running their schools but there's no future for a society … SIMON They don’t have a choice to send them out of zone. DAVID No they don’t. Oh well yes and no that depends on the role of the school that they might want to send them to, but our priority has always been and I think quite appropriately Simon to ensure that students can attend their local school, that’s number one and then if there are places available after that people can attend in addition to that there's no problem with that. SIMON What then is the problem with why shouldn’t schools be able to compete for students? DAVID Well in many areas they do compete for students, in many areas schools have joint zones such as in my home town and in Invercargill and so on, people make choices around whether they want single sex or co-ed, but apart from the issues of social fairness and equity number two consideration has to be the efficient use of public resource and no one wants us to use taxpayers' money inefficiently by having classrooms empty in place X when we've got overcrowding and demand for other capital expenditure in place Y. SIMON I guess from an overview perspective you've got a complete difference between National and Labour illustrated here in a nutshell. National stresses consumer choice, Labour favours centralised control. Why? Who knows best for their children parents or bureaucrats? DAVID No I don’t think that’s fair, National say we favour centralised control, we don’t. We've got a system where control of the schools is extensively devolved to board within certain parameters, you know there is the small matter of the law and students and boards have to obey the law. The big difference is that National has really chosen for reasons. I can't understand for the life of me to go back to policies that were rejected by the electorate … SIMON You say you give them control but you abolished bulk funding to reduce the autonomy of the boards. DAVID Well boards still have considerable autonomy, I mean aside from the funding issues … SIMON But you've reduced it haven't you, you have constrained it? DAVID We have constrained it in terms of the bulk funding issue but the consequences of bulk funding are pretty clear, bulk funding doesn’t improve educational opportunity for students, bulk funding drives down the employment conditions of teachers and means that less experienced teachers are inevitably employed because they're cheaper. SIMON Well it seems we have an education system run by providers, why can't it be more responsive to consumer demand? DAVID Oh I think it's immensely responsive, schools respond to their own communities and I think that’s one of the strengths of our system. SIMON How much then do Teachers' Unions, you've talked about what the teachers want, how much do Teachers' Unions drive education policy? DAVID Well those Teachers' Unions are groups of professionals with voluntary membership who are intimately involved in the delivery of the education that our children get. I want to work with those groups and I've always found them amazingly responsible, I've been a member myself historically as you know, but I think they provide a considerable leadership, also in terms of what's happened with the changes in the assessment system, right throughout our education system and I think they should be valued and not bagged the way Dr Brash is bagging them. SIMON It does seem you’re placing priority on teachers over parents though and you can't miss the fact that there are so many teachers in the Labour Party. DAVID Well that’s their call, but what we're placing priority on is on students, young people their learning and their teaching and what I'm saying is that unless we work co-operatively with teachers their best interests are not going to be served. SIMON Why are parents in our supposedly free education system being asked to stump up so much for fees and donations? DAVID Well I'm glad you've got to that because it gives me the opportunity to make it really clear. It's the government's responsibility to fund the teaching of the core curriculum. Extras are paid for and optional extras are paid for by parents but they must opt in and the simple message about what schools are asking for is this. That unless you opt in, unless you choose to pay there is no requirement it's voluntary. Now I don’t think we could ever stop people paying for school trips, for music tuition, for all those extras that we have and I welcome that, nor would we ever want to stop parents who can afford to make extra donations or contributions to schools from doing so. SIMON But it places inordinate pressure on the parents and stigmatises some of those children. DAVID That’s a function of how it's done by schools and some of the examples we've had recently make it quite clear that some of that behaviour in schools is totally unacceptable. We're doing a lot of work with the Ministry now and principals' organisations, the professional organisations to improve the way that message is communicated. SIMON What sort of results, can you give us any specifics there? DAVID Ah well the one case that’s been in the media we're getting close to the point of agreeing a communication will go out to the students in that school and I think that will become a bit of a model for others, but I've already asked both the PPTA and the NZEI and the secondary principals to come to the party in helping me identify languages and messages that make sure that schools don’t break the law, and that’s the nub of the problem, a lot are and it's not satisfactory and we're on the case. SIMON Associate Minister of Education David Benson-Pope thank your for appearing on Agenda today.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- SIMON We're discussing the interview with David Benson-Pope just moments ago and with me Mark Torley, TVNZ Senior Reporter and Helen Bain, Sunday Star Times Political Editor. NCEA we kicked off with, is he between a rock and a hard place, can he actually make the changes. MARK Well I think it's very interesting that the National when they announced their education policy this week said that they wanted to overhaul NCEA and not scrap it altogether and I think that’s the issue, it's been a policy that’s been more than a decade in the making, it started in the early 90s under National and you know there's been a decision made that you know the School Cert where you spend a week swatting and then you sit your exams and you pass that’s no long applicable, we want a kind of a combination…. SIMON Consistent efforts throughout the year. MARK Yeah internal assessments and external exams, so it's very difficult to change because the education system I think you know the bureaucracy it's very hard to sort of change midstream and so therefore NCEA that’s what we've got. SIMON Is bureaucracy part of the problem, I mean is there the need to keep the teachers' unions on side so strong that they’ll do whatever they say? MARK Well I think if you want to avoid trouble and if you want to you know keeping things ticking along then obviously you need to work with the people that are implementing the policy ultimately and they are the teachers. SIMON What do you make of this Helen? HELEN Yeah it's interesting National does seem to have brought itself a scrap pretty quickly with the teacher unions, and maybe that was their plan all along but it's probably not helpful if those are the people that you would have to work with. SIMON Are we ignoring the needs of parents though, where do parents figure in this whole scheme of things? HELEN I think parents do get an extra bit of leverage obviously because this is election year and I mean if you had kids at secondary school you'd be pretty worried. I think that there is political will to actually do something about that with an election coming up and settle down that concern. I know that Labour's own polling is tell it that education and NCEA is a problem for it. MARK Isn't part of the problem that people don’t understand it, you hear it from you know business organisations, we're getting these sheets of paper and we don’t know how it works. I think you know there needs to be more information out there about how the system works. SIMON Yeah, how much though do you think the essential difference between National and Labour is summarised here, that you've got one side advocating consumer choice and the other one more or less pushing centralised control? HELEN But it's hard to tell though isn't it what the difference really is, I mean it's all very well for National to say NCEA it's a mess, yeah I mean most people are going to agree to some extent with that, but then it wasn’t that clear about what they would do instead, they say yes we'll revamp it, but then what. SIMON More details, more details required all around. What about the zoning issue, I mean we are having a defacto tiered state of secondary schools aren’t we, I mean everybody wants to get into certain zones because the schools are perceived as so much better than others. HELEN But again the difference isn't that clear, I mean National said we will do away with this Labour's very rigid form of zoning, but we won't do away with zoning altogether, and they're saying we won't let the schools that are doing better expand until the schools that are doing less well are full up, but I mean does that mean then that the schools that are doing better can then pick and choose from which students they want while those who are not doing well can't. SIMON Why then shouldn’t you have the National policy of them taking over the lesser performing school and applying some of their better standards? MARK Well how would that work that’s the thing, and it's a difficult one because there's a whole issue of how you fund that, what happens to those other teachers in that other school, all those kinds of things, I mean it sounds good in theory. SIMON Alright, well we can talk about NCEA in schools forever, but Auckland University graduate Dr Ngaire Woods is an Oxford University Fellow and international expert on global economic affairs, she's also presented current affairs programmes for the BBC. Dr Woods was in town this week lecturing at her old university, I caught up with her on Tuesday to discuss the upcoming British election and the Blair government's relationship with the BBC.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- SIMON Inspector General of Intelligence and Security Paul Neazor has this week produced a report into claims the SIS were spying on Maori organisations. The claims appeared in the Sunday Star Times but the reporters found there was no basis for the allegations. Gavin Ellis is a former editor of the New Zealand Herald and former Chairman of the Commonwealth Press Union and he joins me now. How serious a case of misreporting is this Gavin? GAVIN I think that it is a serious case inasmuch as it hits the credibility of the newspaper quite hard. I wouldn’t characterise it as misreporting, I think that what the Sunday Star Times has found itself in is a case where it has been duped and I think they should admit that. SIMON So how would you characterise misreporting if this isn't? GAVIN Well I think that what they did was they reported what they were told and in the shady world of espionage and so on verification is not the easiest thing to come by and they took what they were told as gospel. SIMON But you've got the largest circulating newspaper in the country, you've got a highly regarded experienced journalist in Anthony Hubbard, how could they have got it so wrong? GAVIN They got it so wrong because I think that they were in a way seduced by the glamour of the situation. I think they got taken in by the fact that we had spies, foreign locations, clandestine meetings, American accented guys who seemed to be CIA, it had all of the drama that seduces journalists if they're not careful. Now that is not an excuse. They did not verify the sources anywhere closely enough and the presence of Jack Sanders in this should have rung alarm bells because he'd figured in similar almost Walter Mitty like allegations in the past. Now that should have alerted them and it didn’t. SIMON What would you have done if Anthony Hubbard had come to you with the original claims how would you have handled it? GAVIN Well first of all I would have checked out very very carefully the sources that he presented to me and I would have an alarm bell, not an alarm bell a cacophony of alarm bells going off in the back of my head when I heard the name Jack Sanders. SIMON Is it just a lack of institutional experience that those alarm bells don’t go off people don’t recognise the man? GAVIN No Anthony Hubbard is a very experienced journalist and he's a journalist that I have had a very high regard for, I think that it was the seductive nature of the story and they let their guard slip. SIMON Well what about the editor's role here, I mean you alluded to it a moment ago shouldn’t the editor have applied the checks and balances? GAVIN Absolutely, absolutely, but seduction, you know we tend to think of seduction as being something between two people, it in fact can be a group experience I think. SIMON There's also – I mean you talk about the seductive nature of the story but there must also be commercial pressures at play here, you pitch the story you end up going to China and you know you've also gotta introduce competition on the Sundays at the same time, has the pressure of the commercial situation with the increased competition led to a desire to get the story out faster than it normally would have? GAVIN That was certainly raised at the time because the story broke at about the time the Herald on Sunday was launched and quite clearly the Sunday Star Times wanted a blockbuster story to go with at that time, as we all would to counter competition, that doesn’t excuse them for not doing all of the necessary checks and balances. SIMON Well if New Zealand's biggest paper, one of its most experienced journalists can be so wrong over this, how worrying is the possibility that the media generally may be wrong over so many other things? GAVIN Well I think that if we look on the positive side there's an object lesson in what happened to the Sunday Star Times, because you know if you’re not careful there but the for the grace of God you go, and what should happen now is that every editor in the country if they weren't acutely aware of the need for checks and balances in every story, they sure as hell are now. SIMON How do you think tomorrow's Sunday Star Times will handle this? GAVIN Well I hope that they will do something of a mea culpa, now they were duped and I think that what they should say and if I was in their position what I would do is say we were duped and in those circumstances I'd hang the sources out to dry because I don’t think that the Sunday Star Times owes them anything. SIMON Alright well let's bring Mark Torley in. Mark have you got anything you'd like to ask Gavin? MARK Well yes, I'm just wondering what do you think – I think that one of the most interesting things here is what were the motives of these three men in this, can we get any idea, I notice that in the report there's a suggestion that it was akin to fire starting and then putting it out again, what do you say to that? GAVIN Yeah well I saw that, that was sort of Paul Neazor's parting comment. I think that these guys live in a Walter Mittyish world, they probably have quite dull existences and they're out to enliven their own lives, God knows. The one thing that I think we can be pretty satisfied about is that these guys if they have any intelligence connections they are very much on the periphery, they're just touching the edges it at all, but it really has a Walter Mittyish quality about it and I think that in those circumstances looking for rational explanations is probably a bit futile. SIMON So you think it's a mea culpa on the part of the newspaper tomorrow, will there be consequences? GAVIN That’s really up to them, I think that what the Sunday Star Times should at the very least do is tell its readers what systems it will now put in place to ensure that this doesn’t happen again. Newspapers have to do that from time to time and I don’t think that any editor in the country should take any satisfaction from what's happened to the Sunday Star Times because if you’re not careful, if you don’t do the right things it can happen to you. SIMON It may reinforce the right standards and offer us say positive results for journalism. GAVIN Let's hope so. SIMON Thank you very much Gavin. Transcripts are copyright to Front Page Ltd and may contain errors. They should be checked against a taped copy of the programme to ensure accuracy. Copyright to Front Page Ltd but may be used PROVIDED attribution is made to TVOne and Agenda |
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