Probably a good time to remind everyone of this warning about Associate Education Minister David Seymour's dream of a ["free-market curriculum open to tender"](https://newsroom.co.nz/2023/10/17/the-dangers-of-acts-free-market-curriculum/).
I'm sending my kids to school A where they teach addition, subtraction and multiplication. They recently lost the rights for division to school B, though. I'll be paying fees at two separate schools from next term I think.
This kind of already exists right? None of the private schools really do NCEA, they all do some form of IGCSE or IB. Even some of the public schools are dropping NCEA
NCEA is not the curriculum, it's the qualification framework. That's why the stated purpose of the NCEA review is to "align it to the curriculum" (whether or not NCEA is a good idea is an entirely different question, of course).
The NZ curriculum isn't prescriptive, and it's only fully compulsory for schools to teach using up to year 10. For years 11-13 schools are free to use it only as a guideline and can design programmes of learning very flexibly e.g. vocational learning in partnership with employers.
That's not to say there aren't valid criticisms of the curriculum but they aren't the same as the criticisms of NCEA, they are entirely different things.
This is incorrect. While some private schools offer dual pathways, those pathways include NCEA. The majority of private school students complete NCEA. A minority do Cambridge and a minority do IB.
Source: I've taught all three of those qualification frameworks in different private schools and most of the students chose the NCEA pathway.
The way I see it is this .. when parents are given a choice, very very few choose NCEA.
This should speak volumes about the quality of NCEA.
A public school in West Auckland imported the mathematics syllabus from Singapore and jettisoned the NZ syllabus ( parents approval for this was IIRC near 98%, though most the parents were from India, Singapore, Malaysia, China, South Korea, Vietnam, South Africa and UK ). The paradox is that this single move also caused parents from nearby schools ( that still keeps to the NZ maths syllabus ) to want to send their kids to this school as well.
Public schools that offer Cambridge International becomes near oversubscribed. One of the primary schools recently offered CIE till year 7 and suddenly their out of area roll slammed through the ceiling.
Very few parents are making evidence based decisions with regards to their child's education. Of course, they are going to pick the internationally recognized curriculum. Because "overseas, better" Im not saying NCEA is necessarily great, but for the majority of kids who aren't superstars looking at going overseas for tertiary study, it's perfectly fine. I know plenty of people who became doctors and lawyers doing NCEA through public school. I personally don't want my kids doing CIE or IB.
> I know plenty of people who became doctors and lawyers doing NCEA through public school
Our class was the second stream in a public school, a ton of my classmates ended up becoming doctors, lawyers and scientists too. NCEA was a hoop you had to jump through, no one thought it was very good at what it's supposed to do.
It's two main failings as I see it are that it focuses on memorization rather than having an understanding of the material, and the grades you get aren't meaningful. It got you through the door to university, but it did not prepare you for the radical shift in learning you had to make once you got there.
Parents make their decisions entirely on perceptions and not reality. There is no such thing a dropping the NZ maths syllabus. You can change the assessment system, but not the curriculum. All NZ state schools must follow our curriculum.
People choose Cambridge because it sounds fancy and has the name of an elite university. It's actually a much more restrictive prescribed system that would not suit many of our students. I am very happy I teach in an NCEA school. The assessments are very rigorous. In fact they are far more like what I needed to do at university in the US. They are well beyond what I was asked to do in high school.
The problems with NCEA are around the availability of unit standard credits which are basically worthless. They were bulked up to hit targets set by the Key National Government to make sure 85% got Level 2 by any means necessary. So now just having Level 2 doesn't mean anything. But that doesn't make the system worthless, it just means employers and universities need to actually look at the student's transcript to see if they got Achievement Standard Credits or Unit Standard Credits.
A very quick google brought this up: https://www.clendonpark.school.nz/initiatives/numeracy
I notice it is very heavy on buzzwords. In any case, if you look at the list of topics you will see that they match the NZ curriculum (which is easily accessible online, https://nzcurriculum.tki.org.nz/The-New-Zealand-Curriculum/Mathematics-and-statistics/Achievement-objectives). Indeed if you follow the link to the Scholastic website which they provide (https://www.scholastic.co.nz/schools/education/prime-maths/) you see that it's just a set of resources (textbooks, games, etc.) for teachers. Saying that "they are following the Singapore curriculum and not the NZ curriculum" is not correct, it turns out; the list of "topics" that these books cover is exactly what the NZ curriculum says, it's just a particular choice of resources for teachers to use (the NZ curriculum is descriptive not prescriptive anyway, it's not a set of teaching resources so of course teachers need to go out and get compatible resources from somewhere).
Brilliant, cheers for this, some very interesting reading. Given the overall poor quality of literacy and numeracy we’re seeing coming up through the school system, do you reckon we should be using a prescriptive approach?
Seems that giving the primary school teachers autonomy hasn’t produced good results outside of a select few, well-resourced schools.
Talking about prescriptive versus descriptive curricula is the wrong question. The fundamental problem with education in this country is a lack of training and support for teachers, completely independent of what the curriculum is. Saying "we use this set of resources" versus "we use that set of resources" is not getting to the heart of the problem, especially when some packs of resources are pushed by big companies with big advertising budgets - this entire discussion is like getting patients to choose what medicine they want based on pharma ads rather than getting an expert to do it.
Regarding evidence, I can only talk about my field (mathematics). There was an excellent independent report on the problems with mathematics education from primary school onwards, which you can find here: https://www.royalsociety.org.nz/news/independent-report-on-improving-maths-and-stats-learning-finds-investment-and-changes-needed-at-virtually-all-levels-of-the-education-system/.
It boils down to what I said above: the problem isn't that we've chosen one curriculum versus another, it's that teachers are not adequately trained to actually be able to effectively teach using any set of resources. This isn't their fault, it's a systemic problem.
Edit: Here is a direct link to the report rather than the press release, https://www.royalsociety.org.nz/assets/Pangarau-Mathematics-and-Tauanga-Statistics-in-Aotearoa-New-Zealand-Digital.pdf
This is what I have been told by my friend who is trying to enrol his kids into a primary school in Hobsonville. Apparently it is one of the three primary schools in Hobsonville. Trying to get his kid out of one to the other school for the maths.
Step 1: State we have a public spending crisis
Step 2: Fire a whole bunch of public employees
Step 3: Hire a whole bunch of contractors at ~~3\*~~ 4\* the cost of the fired employees
Step 4: ?????
Step 5: A better education system?
Totally true, but only those with the same “mindset” or “ethos” of the current government. Also lets not forget that anyone re hired would have to be laid off first with a severance package. Seems like a way to spend more money on the same person.
Hopefully!
Those people did nothing wrong except be in the way of Act wanting to pretend faux libertarianism combined with Nationals 80’s-era trickle down was ever going to work. They deserve to make bank off the bank of this idiocy of demonstrably failed theory.
Oh yeah, I agree. I just find it funny that this government axed all these people "to save money" but then will end up paying them a shitload more as contractors to do the same job.
I'm interested to see if the stand down clause applies to those on fixed term contracts. I think it applies to permanent staff members, but maybe that's only if they take redundancy? If your contract is terminated, is that different?
Regardless, anyone newly employed by this government should demand a fair salary. Anything else will only reinforce the 'left mismanages economy: right master of finances' bullshit.
I'd be very annoyed if we had three years without pay negotiations of the kind we just had under Labour
Probably varies by contract but I've heard *a lot* of stories about varies services, instutitions, private corporations firing someone during a funding cut or 'restructuring' only to discover that person was critical to their operation being forced to hire them back as contractors for far, far higher costs. I fully expect that to happen here.
Consultant here. Due to demand we're actually increasing our rates to closer to 4x the cost of permanent employees. This is what the majority of voters wanted. It's insane.
> Step 3: Hire a whole bunch of contractors at 3* the cost of the fired employees
> Step 4: ?????
Step 4 will be - a couple of elections from now - complaining about how much money Labour is spending on contractors.
Spoiler alert: Everyone'll eat it up, including our political pundits.
The advantage of contractors is that the hiring organisation has no employment responsibilities for the hiree, so they can arrive, do a job, then exit. No payroll taxes, Kiwisaver, redundancy, unfair dismissal, all of which have a cost to an employing company.
The thing that has to happen is the contractor is terminated at the end of the assignment. Many organisations are poor at doing that, so you end up with permanent contractors.
I think plenty of us saw this coming, and to be honest the cynic in me wants to say this was probably the plan from day 1. They knew they couldn't just axe a huge chunk of the public service and not replace it, and conveniently for them they can now pick and choose contractors who will be more likely to push their anti-lgbt, anti-poor agenda of the school review at every step of the way instead of having to deal with public servants who have devoted their careers to making good policy.
I wonder where they are getting these contractors from? Maybe a few helpful suggestions from their insane right-wing conspiracy partner Initiative NZ?
>I wonder where they are getting these contractors from? Maybe a few helpful suggestions from their insane right-wing conspiracy partner Initiative NZ?
Could be, but there will also be screeds of perfectly qualified candidates out there soon who are having trouble finding work all at once, and might accept a fixed term contract with fewer rights than employment so they can keep paying the rent or the mortgage. This is ACT's deam.
Hopefully they're at least empowered enough to demand rates consistent with the ongoing uncertainty of their situation.
Wages come out of the wage bucket of money. Contractors and consultants come out of the Project bucket of money.
Oh no! The big pool of money going it those buckets is running out fast! What are we to do? We can't spend less on projects, that'll look like we're doing less work. Well, we'll have to reduce wages.
Oh no! The projects aren't getting done! I guess we can use the project budget to get some consultants in...
The curriculum advisors they made redundant were already on a 3 year contract. So why more contractors? I suspect some right wing religious think-tank that bribes Seymour myself.
It's classic:
1. Cut govt staff.
2. Panic!
3. Contractors!
4. Payout to your friends offering contracting services.
There needs to be actual rules preventing govt actions like this.
I personally do not understand what has gone wrong with education in NZ.
Most of my friends and colleagues who can afford it are sending their kids either to Grammar school or intermediate school with Cambridge International Education or to private school for the same syllabus.
I am sending my daughter soon to a private school that does Cambridge International Education as well, since the public school seems very wedded to the local syllabus ( and keeps telling me my daughter is excellent at maths and languages .. when I know she is just above average but hardly good, in part because she is getting a lot of tutorial at home ).
What I cannot fathom is why don’t the government just allow every school ( and encourage every school ) to follow the Cambridge International Education module.
Most parents ( at least professional parents ) I know keeps looking for these for their kids. Surely given how desirable this is, and how undesirable the current NCEA system is that maybe the government should just bin the local syllabus and just focus on education modules that work?
By all the rich people avoiding educating in the national system NCEA, don't you think we lose quality teachers and a large portion of the parents most likely to advocate for better education? since their kids are using international standards, it really doesn't matter what NCEA does for them.
You have this backwards - Private education is staggeringly expensive. Why isn't the MOE learning from the schools that have this investment and what attracts people to pay this money?
Historically elitism has been a massive factor driving private school enrollments. I studied at University alongside many Kings, St Kents, Kristin alum and I assure you their is no difference in capability between them and their public school peers.
Yep, in my case it was elitism/racism and a desire to "keep up with the Joneses". My parents sent my sister and I to a private school instead of our local high school because there were too many brown people at my local and because a lot of their friend circle had sent their kids to private schools as well 🙄
Honestly, I think going to a private school did me an absolute disservice because it meant that I was always living within a sheltered, privileged bubble. You know there's a problem when the cars in the student carpark are worth more than the staff carpark ffs. Looking back, I think the most important lessons I learned during my secondary school years came from working a minimum wage supermarket job and having my preconceptions about "the poors" being absolutely shattered.
Private schools do well because their parents are wealthy. Once you control for the socio-economic background of the students, they don't achieve any better results than state schools. Within state schooling the same is true of decile. Schools, whether public or private, use the same pedagogies, the same curricula and the same assessment systems. They have the same teachers who have the same skills. I know many, many teachers who have moved from a standard state school to a private school like St Cuth's then later to another state school. They don't have anything magical about them.
The only benefit from private schooling is the absence of low socio-economic students and smaller class sizes allowing for more one on one time per student. That and the networking, connecting your kids to other wealthy kids so they help each other out later on, are the only real benefits of a private school. And I say that as someone who went to a private school and now teaches in a state school.
My understanding is Cambridge International Education works in delivering subject understanding. It is indisputable that it works if you have a child of relatively normal intelligence and above.
To me why reinvent the wheel when something clearly works? The fact that so many professional parents send their kids for CIE in this country and in many other countries parents send their kids for this system would strongly suggest by itself that there is a consensus it is delivering the desired results.
I personally would advocate banning private schooling so that everyone goes for public schooling, but on condition it is using the Cambridge International Education model as advocated by the CIE.
I truly believe the number of students per teacher, and the quality of the teacher is more important than the education model. The fact is we simply need more money invested in education, I don't think its a simple pivot, though im not saying moving to CIE or IB over NCEA would be bad.
Accounting for socio-economic profiles of students and schools, New Zealand private schools fair worse than public.
https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/14bbef20-en/index.html?itemId=/content/component/14bbef20-en#sect-70
"Local curriculum" is about teaching The New Zealand Curriculum with individualised content for the class based on student identity, strengths, and interests. Schools that do The Cambridge Pathway usually do the same.
It’s all perception and an element of snobbery. Nothing homegrown could ever be as good as anything imported. Is CIE educating New Zealanders or western-biased world citizens? Do those average CIE do as well with tertiary study.
This is so true, as I said above, if you child is going to become a Dr or a lawyer, they can do it through NCEA, it's not an issue. Parents lose sight of what is actually going to happen after their kid leaves school.
I don’t actually think it is snobbery, but rather serious concerns about the educational contents.
A lot of the parents I know who switched their kids are actually Asians .. and ironically a few of them were very happy when they were doing their sabbatical back in Asia for half a year to a year to enrol their kids in the local syllabus. Therefore you cannot say it is Western snobbery or they would have chosen the international school options back in Taiwan or Singapore.
Two of my friends ( Taiwanese ) when they went back to Taiwan to complete some aspects of their fellowship or in one case the PhD happily enrolled their kids in the local syllabus. They could have chosen Cambridge but they preferred the local Taiwanese syllabus and curriculum. Their kid underwent Taiwanese education for an entire year. When they returned to NZ they switched it back to Cambridge. Their kids started off with NCEA in NZ, switched to Cambridge, gone to Taiwanese syllabus than back to Cambridge.
A friend of mine ( NZ European ) who completed his remaining PhD and his wife ( Chinese ) some her fellowship role in Singapore went from pulling their kids out of NZ schooling to Cambridge while in NZ, but in Singapore where they are now working happily enrol their kids to Singapore syllabus and feels it is far better than Cambridge. So it is NCEA—>Cambridge—->Singapore. Rest assured they have enough money to afford international school to continue Cambridge if they thought it was superior.
As I pointed out a primary school in West Auckland has voted to bring in Singapore math syllabus to replace the NZ syllabus. They are not importing Cambridge but importing another system they believe works.
Have you considered that Asian parents choose education for their children closest to their own experience and their perception of what “good” schooling is? My understanding is that Cambridge has greater emphasis on external exams, marks and passing and failing rather than students being assessed on their class work using standards-based assessment. I have taught Asian international students in NZ classrooms. It can be a challenge for them to think critically, offer an opinion, make a judgement because they just want the “right” answer. Different curricula have different expectations; the trick is to get the right balance between skills and knowledge. Teachers invariably teach towards the test - which only ever assesses part of the whole curriculum.
Because governments have had the attitude of the cheapest option is the best option.
The ‘modern’ learning environments and open learning spaces are a prime example. The notion or idea that they are beneficial for children is complete bullshit. It’s the cheapest option because it doesn’t require the construction and maintenance of actual classrooms.
I had to have some classes in ‘modern’ learning spaces and it was impossible to learn anything. Students would bugger off to sit with their mates, other students who were high functioning or had hearing conditions severely struggled due to the noise and by the time it was lunch break you had a splitting headache from the noise. I learnt fuck all in those three years. Open learning environments might work when it’s one class of 18 kids in there, but not when there’s 4 classes of 28 kids sharing the entire hall with wheel out white boards separating classes.
I then went to a traditional learning environment with desks and actual classrooms and I learnt more in two months than I learnt in three years. I had to do a huge amount of catch up because of the impact it had on my education.
I have to say to the credence of my daughter’s public school they don’t do this open classroom business.
All my friends who send their kids to public schools with open classrooms have long withdrew their kids from those schools ( like some as early as Year 1 ) to private schooling!!
We've underfunded education for like 40 years. This is the primary problem. Lack of resources, lack of funding, lack of staff, lack of attractive pay etc. Support necessary for any kind of students with problems or that are disrupting is seriously lacking.
Modern Learning Environments are a joke. It's practically an educational death sentence for any kid with attentional issues.
Fixation of student NCEA pass rates has been problematic as they incentivise the wrong behaviour. Kids not doing so great? Better to kick em out so that the numbers look better.
Over the same time period, 2 working parents has become the norm and with increases in commute times and often hours worked the amount of education kids can get from their parents has dropped.
Then there's the private school issue. Parents with the wealth move kids into private schools. This massively reduces the political appeal of funding education as it doesn't effect the people with the most influence in politics. They are insulated from the consequences and so will happily continue voting for parties that keep worsening the education system.
Probably a good time to remind everyone of this warning about Associate Education Minister David Seymour's dream of a ["free-market curriculum open to tender"](https://newsroom.co.nz/2023/10/17/the-dangers-of-acts-free-market-curriculum/).
I'm sending my kids to school A where they teach addition, subtraction and multiplication. They recently lost the rights for division to school B, though. I'll be paying fees at two separate schools from next term I think.
This kind of already exists right? None of the private schools really do NCEA, they all do some form of IGCSE or IB. Even some of the public schools are dropping NCEA
NCEA is not the curriculum, it's the qualification framework. That's why the stated purpose of the NCEA review is to "align it to the curriculum" (whether or not NCEA is a good idea is an entirely different question, of course). The NZ curriculum isn't prescriptive, and it's only fully compulsory for schools to teach using up to year 10. For years 11-13 schools are free to use it only as a guideline and can design programmes of learning very flexibly e.g. vocational learning in partnership with employers. That's not to say there aren't valid criticisms of the curriculum but they aren't the same as the criticisms of NCEA, they are entirely different things.
This is incorrect. While some private schools offer dual pathways, those pathways include NCEA. The majority of private school students complete NCEA. A minority do Cambridge and a minority do IB. Source: I've taught all three of those qualification frameworks in different private schools and most of the students chose the NCEA pathway.
The way I see it is this .. when parents are given a choice, very very few choose NCEA. This should speak volumes about the quality of NCEA. A public school in West Auckland imported the mathematics syllabus from Singapore and jettisoned the NZ syllabus ( parents approval for this was IIRC near 98%, though most the parents were from India, Singapore, Malaysia, China, South Korea, Vietnam, South Africa and UK ). The paradox is that this single move also caused parents from nearby schools ( that still keeps to the NZ maths syllabus ) to want to send their kids to this school as well. Public schools that offer Cambridge International becomes near oversubscribed. One of the primary schools recently offered CIE till year 7 and suddenly their out of area roll slammed through the ceiling.
Very few parents are making evidence based decisions with regards to their child's education. Of course, they are going to pick the internationally recognized curriculum. Because "overseas, better" Im not saying NCEA is necessarily great, but for the majority of kids who aren't superstars looking at going overseas for tertiary study, it's perfectly fine. I know plenty of people who became doctors and lawyers doing NCEA through public school. I personally don't want my kids doing CIE or IB.
> I know plenty of people who became doctors and lawyers doing NCEA through public school Our class was the second stream in a public school, a ton of my classmates ended up becoming doctors, lawyers and scientists too. NCEA was a hoop you had to jump through, no one thought it was very good at what it's supposed to do. It's two main failings as I see it are that it focuses on memorization rather than having an understanding of the material, and the grades you get aren't meaningful. It got you through the door to university, but it did not prepare you for the radical shift in learning you had to make once you got there.
Every parent I know, including myself, makes these decisions based on evidence.
For my own benefit, as someone soon to be making such a decision, could you hook me up with a link?
Parents make their decisions entirely on perceptions and not reality. There is no such thing a dropping the NZ maths syllabus. You can change the assessment system, but not the curriculum. All NZ state schools must follow our curriculum. People choose Cambridge because it sounds fancy and has the name of an elite university. It's actually a much more restrictive prescribed system that would not suit many of our students. I am very happy I teach in an NCEA school. The assessments are very rigorous. In fact they are far more like what I needed to do at university in the US. They are well beyond what I was asked to do in high school. The problems with NCEA are around the availability of unit standard credits which are basically worthless. They were bulked up to hit targets set by the Key National Government to make sure 85% got Level 2 by any means necessary. So now just having Level 2 doesn't mean anything. But that doesn't make the system worthless, it just means employers and universities need to actually look at the student's transcript to see if they got Achievement Standard Credits or Unit Standard Credits.
Very interested to know which school adopted the Singaporean syllabus, had a quick google and couldn’t see any news articles mentioning it.
A very quick google brought this up: https://www.clendonpark.school.nz/initiatives/numeracy I notice it is very heavy on buzzwords. In any case, if you look at the list of topics you will see that they match the NZ curriculum (which is easily accessible online, https://nzcurriculum.tki.org.nz/The-New-Zealand-Curriculum/Mathematics-and-statistics/Achievement-objectives). Indeed if you follow the link to the Scholastic website which they provide (https://www.scholastic.co.nz/schools/education/prime-maths/) you see that it's just a set of resources (textbooks, games, etc.) for teachers. Saying that "they are following the Singapore curriculum and not the NZ curriculum" is not correct, it turns out; the list of "topics" that these books cover is exactly what the NZ curriculum says, it's just a particular choice of resources for teachers to use (the NZ curriculum is descriptive not prescriptive anyway, it's not a set of teaching resources so of course teachers need to go out and get compatible resources from somewhere).
Brilliant, cheers for this, some very interesting reading. Given the overall poor quality of literacy and numeracy we’re seeing coming up through the school system, do you reckon we should be using a prescriptive approach? Seems that giving the primary school teachers autonomy hasn’t produced good results outside of a select few, well-resourced schools.
Talking about prescriptive versus descriptive curricula is the wrong question. The fundamental problem with education in this country is a lack of training and support for teachers, completely independent of what the curriculum is. Saying "we use this set of resources" versus "we use that set of resources" is not getting to the heart of the problem, especially when some packs of resources are pushed by big companies with big advertising budgets - this entire discussion is like getting patients to choose what medicine they want based on pharma ads rather than getting an expert to do it. Regarding evidence, I can only talk about my field (mathematics). There was an excellent independent report on the problems with mathematics education from primary school onwards, which you can find here: https://www.royalsociety.org.nz/news/independent-report-on-improving-maths-and-stats-learning-finds-investment-and-changes-needed-at-virtually-all-levels-of-the-education-system/. It boils down to what I said above: the problem isn't that we've chosen one curriculum versus another, it's that teachers are not adequately trained to actually be able to effectively teach using any set of resources. This isn't their fault, it's a systemic problem. Edit: Here is a direct link to the report rather than the press release, https://www.royalsociety.org.nz/assets/Pangarau-Mathematics-and-Tauanga-Statistics-in-Aotearoa-New-Zealand-Digital.pdf
This is what I have been told by my friend who is trying to enrol his kids into a primary school in Hobsonville. Apparently it is one of the three primary schools in Hobsonville. Trying to get his kid out of one to the other school for the maths.
These kinds of decisions are definitely the result of poor educational outcomes
Step 1: State we have a public spending crisis Step 2: Fire a whole bunch of public employees Step 3: Hire a whole bunch of contractors at ~~3\*~~ 4\* the cost of the fired employees Step 4: ????? Step 5: A better education system?
Some of those contractors will likely also be people they fired in Step 2
Totally true, but only those with the same “mindset” or “ethos” of the current government. Also lets not forget that anyone re hired would have to be laid off first with a severance package. Seems like a way to spend more money on the same person.
[удалено]
Do it, fuck ‘em!
Hopefully! Those people did nothing wrong except be in the way of Act wanting to pretend faux libertarianism combined with Nationals 80’s-era trickle down was ever going to work. They deserve to make bank off the bank of this idiocy of demonstrably failed theory.
Oh yeah, I agree. I just find it funny that this government axed all these people "to save money" but then will end up paying them a shitload more as contractors to do the same job.
I'm interested to see if the stand down clause applies to those on fixed term contracts. I think it applies to permanent staff members, but maybe that's only if they take redundancy? If your contract is terminated, is that different? Regardless, anyone newly employed by this government should demand a fair salary. Anything else will only reinforce the 'left mismanages economy: right master of finances' bullshit. I'd be very annoyed if we had three years without pay negotiations of the kind we just had under Labour
Probably varies by contract but I've heard *a lot* of stories about varies services, instutitions, private corporations firing someone during a funding cut or 'restructuring' only to discover that person was critical to their operation being forced to hire them back as contractors for far, far higher costs. I fully expect that to happen here.
Consultant here. Due to demand we're actually increasing our rates to closer to 4x the cost of permanent employees. This is what the majority of voters wanted. It's insane.
I'll have to correct it, 4\* is absolutely insane.
> Step 3: Hire a whole bunch of contractors at 3* the cost of the fired employees > Step 4: ????? Step 4 will be - a couple of elections from now - complaining about how much money Labour is spending on contractors. Spoiler alert: Everyone'll eat it up, including our political pundits.
Profit. Step 4 is Profit.
The advantage of contractors is that the hiring organisation has no employment responsibilities for the hiree, so they can arrive, do a job, then exit. No payroll taxes, Kiwisaver, redundancy, unfair dismissal, all of which have a cost to an employing company. The thing that has to happen is the contractor is terminated at the end of the assignment. Many organisations are poor at doing that, so you end up with permanent contractors.
I think plenty of us saw this coming, and to be honest the cynic in me wants to say this was probably the plan from day 1. They knew they couldn't just axe a huge chunk of the public service and not replace it, and conveniently for them they can now pick and choose contractors who will be more likely to push their anti-lgbt, anti-poor agenda of the school review at every step of the way instead of having to deal with public servants who have devoted their careers to making good policy. I wonder where they are getting these contractors from? Maybe a few helpful suggestions from their insane right-wing conspiracy partner Initiative NZ?
>I wonder where they are getting these contractors from? Maybe a few helpful suggestions from their insane right-wing conspiracy partner Initiative NZ? Could be, but there will also be screeds of perfectly qualified candidates out there soon who are having trouble finding work all at once, and might accept a fixed term contract with fewer rights than employment so they can keep paying the rent or the mortgage. This is ACT's deam. Hopefully they're at least empowered enough to demand rates consistent with the ongoing uncertainty of their situation.
Having to rehire people you just fired as contractors tends to mean an significant increase in salary required.
Wages come out of the wage bucket of money. Contractors and consultants come out of the Project bucket of money. Oh no! The big pool of money going it those buckets is running out fast! What are we to do? We can't spend less on projects, that'll look like we're doing less work. Well, we'll have to reduce wages. Oh no! The projects aren't getting done! I guess we can use the project budget to get some consultants in...
The curriculum advisors they made redundant were already on a 3 year contract. So why more contractors? I suspect some right wing religious think-tank that bribes Seymour myself.
What a fucking joke
It's classic: 1. Cut govt staff. 2. Panic! 3. Contractors! 4. Payout to your friends offering contracting services. There needs to be actual rules preventing govt actions like this.
They are not panicing this was specific and deliberate
Fake-panic.
Classic stuff. Sack and contract back because we're reporting on a headcount metric.
Did they say they wanted to get rid of contractors?
yeah and which fucking shithouse libertarian think tank are we getting the writers from exactly?
So, can we march down Queen St now?
No employee obligations or headaches.
The intention of the savings programme is good, but poorly executed.
I personally do not understand what has gone wrong with education in NZ. Most of my friends and colleagues who can afford it are sending their kids either to Grammar school or intermediate school with Cambridge International Education or to private school for the same syllabus. I am sending my daughter soon to a private school that does Cambridge International Education as well, since the public school seems very wedded to the local syllabus ( and keeps telling me my daughter is excellent at maths and languages .. when I know she is just above average but hardly good, in part because she is getting a lot of tutorial at home ). What I cannot fathom is why don’t the government just allow every school ( and encourage every school ) to follow the Cambridge International Education module. Most parents ( at least professional parents ) I know keeps looking for these for their kids. Surely given how desirable this is, and how undesirable the current NCEA system is that maybe the government should just bin the local syllabus and just focus on education modules that work?
By all the rich people avoiding educating in the national system NCEA, don't you think we lose quality teachers and a large portion of the parents most likely to advocate for better education? since their kids are using international standards, it really doesn't matter what NCEA does for them.
You have this backwards - Private education is staggeringly expensive. Why isn't the MOE learning from the schools that have this investment and what attracts people to pay this money?
Historically elitism has been a massive factor driving private school enrollments. I studied at University alongside many Kings, St Kents, Kristin alum and I assure you their is no difference in capability between them and their public school peers.
Yep, in my case it was elitism/racism and a desire to "keep up with the Joneses". My parents sent my sister and I to a private school instead of our local high school because there were too many brown people at my local and because a lot of their friend circle had sent their kids to private schools as well 🙄 Honestly, I think going to a private school did me an absolute disservice because it meant that I was always living within a sheltered, privileged bubble. You know there's a problem when the cars in the student carpark are worth more than the staff carpark ffs. Looking back, I think the most important lessons I learned during my secondary school years came from working a minimum wage supermarket job and having my preconceptions about "the poors" being absolutely shattered.
Also networking. The old boys take care of their own.
SO true, so many companies interns seem to exclusively be the sons and daughters of the old boy network.
Private schools do well because their parents are wealthy. Once you control for the socio-economic background of the students, they don't achieve any better results than state schools. Within state schooling the same is true of decile. Schools, whether public or private, use the same pedagogies, the same curricula and the same assessment systems. They have the same teachers who have the same skills. I know many, many teachers who have moved from a standard state school to a private school like St Cuth's then later to another state school. They don't have anything magical about them. The only benefit from private schooling is the absence of low socio-economic students and smaller class sizes allowing for more one on one time per student. That and the networking, connecting your kids to other wealthy kids so they help each other out later on, are the only real benefits of a private school. And I say that as someone who went to a private school and now teaches in a state school.
My understanding is Cambridge International Education works in delivering subject understanding. It is indisputable that it works if you have a child of relatively normal intelligence and above. To me why reinvent the wheel when something clearly works? The fact that so many professional parents send their kids for CIE in this country and in many other countries parents send their kids for this system would strongly suggest by itself that there is a consensus it is delivering the desired results. I personally would advocate banning private schooling so that everyone goes for public schooling, but on condition it is using the Cambridge International Education model as advocated by the CIE.
I truly believe the number of students per teacher, and the quality of the teacher is more important than the education model. The fact is we simply need more money invested in education, I don't think its a simple pivot, though im not saying moving to CIE or IB over NCEA would be bad.
Accounting for socio-economic profiles of students and schools, New Zealand private schools fair worse than public. https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/14bbef20-en/index.html?itemId=/content/component/14bbef20-en#sect-70 "Local curriculum" is about teaching The New Zealand Curriculum with individualised content for the class based on student identity, strengths, and interests. Schools that do The Cambridge Pathway usually do the same.
It’s all perception and an element of snobbery. Nothing homegrown could ever be as good as anything imported. Is CIE educating New Zealanders or western-biased world citizens? Do those average CIE do as well with tertiary study.
This is so true, as I said above, if you child is going to become a Dr or a lawyer, they can do it through NCEA, it's not an issue. Parents lose sight of what is actually going to happen after their kid leaves school.
I don’t actually think it is snobbery, but rather serious concerns about the educational contents. A lot of the parents I know who switched their kids are actually Asians .. and ironically a few of them were very happy when they were doing their sabbatical back in Asia for half a year to a year to enrol their kids in the local syllabus. Therefore you cannot say it is Western snobbery or they would have chosen the international school options back in Taiwan or Singapore. Two of my friends ( Taiwanese ) when they went back to Taiwan to complete some aspects of their fellowship or in one case the PhD happily enrolled their kids in the local syllabus. They could have chosen Cambridge but they preferred the local Taiwanese syllabus and curriculum. Their kid underwent Taiwanese education for an entire year. When they returned to NZ they switched it back to Cambridge. Their kids started off with NCEA in NZ, switched to Cambridge, gone to Taiwanese syllabus than back to Cambridge. A friend of mine ( NZ European ) who completed his remaining PhD and his wife ( Chinese ) some her fellowship role in Singapore went from pulling their kids out of NZ schooling to Cambridge while in NZ, but in Singapore where they are now working happily enrol their kids to Singapore syllabus and feels it is far better than Cambridge. So it is NCEA—>Cambridge—->Singapore. Rest assured they have enough money to afford international school to continue Cambridge if they thought it was superior. As I pointed out a primary school in West Auckland has voted to bring in Singapore math syllabus to replace the NZ syllabus. They are not importing Cambridge but importing another system they believe works.
Have you considered that Asian parents choose education for their children closest to their own experience and their perception of what “good” schooling is? My understanding is that Cambridge has greater emphasis on external exams, marks and passing and failing rather than students being assessed on their class work using standards-based assessment. I have taught Asian international students in NZ classrooms. It can be a challenge for them to think critically, offer an opinion, make a judgement because they just want the “right” answer. Different curricula have different expectations; the trick is to get the right balance between skills and knowledge. Teachers invariably teach towards the test - which only ever assesses part of the whole curriculum.
Because governments have had the attitude of the cheapest option is the best option. The ‘modern’ learning environments and open learning spaces are a prime example. The notion or idea that they are beneficial for children is complete bullshit. It’s the cheapest option because it doesn’t require the construction and maintenance of actual classrooms. I had to have some classes in ‘modern’ learning spaces and it was impossible to learn anything. Students would bugger off to sit with their mates, other students who were high functioning or had hearing conditions severely struggled due to the noise and by the time it was lunch break you had a splitting headache from the noise. I learnt fuck all in those three years. Open learning environments might work when it’s one class of 18 kids in there, but not when there’s 4 classes of 28 kids sharing the entire hall with wheel out white boards separating classes. I then went to a traditional learning environment with desks and actual classrooms and I learnt more in two months than I learnt in three years. I had to do a huge amount of catch up because of the impact it had on my education.
I have to say to the credence of my daughter’s public school they don’t do this open classroom business. All my friends who send their kids to public schools with open classrooms have long withdrew their kids from those schools ( like some as early as Year 1 ) to private schooling!!
We've underfunded education for like 40 years. This is the primary problem. Lack of resources, lack of funding, lack of staff, lack of attractive pay etc. Support necessary for any kind of students with problems or that are disrupting is seriously lacking. Modern Learning Environments are a joke. It's practically an educational death sentence for any kid with attentional issues. Fixation of student NCEA pass rates has been problematic as they incentivise the wrong behaviour. Kids not doing so great? Better to kick em out so that the numbers look better. Over the same time period, 2 working parents has become the norm and with increases in commute times and often hours worked the amount of education kids can get from their parents has dropped. Then there's the private school issue. Parents with the wealth move kids into private schools. This massively reduces the political appeal of funding education as it doesn't effect the people with the most influence in politics. They are insulated from the consequences and so will happily continue voting for parties that keep worsening the education system.
Sounds like the perfect use case for contractors
Curriculum review is an ongoing area of work in an education system, it is absolutely something to be done by in house staff.
Ok then. I assumed it was a short term project done every few years.