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Viewpoint of Kate Gainsford, President of the New Zealand Post Primary Teachers' Association (PPTA), on the Budget changes to Vote:Education.
June 2010
Ops grant increase cloaks the swindle
The Budget has proposed sweeping changes to the formula for funding schools. Funding has been set at the 1 March roll so schools can plan programmes for the year with some certainty but the ministry has figured that there may be savings if rolls are recalculated every term.
Of course what seems eminently rational to a bureaucrat sitting in an office in Wellington may be less sensible at the front line.
The problem with a system that has funding following the students to another institution is that it undermines the delivery of courses for those students who remain in school.
It may work in large tertiary institutions that have sufficient funding to carry a loss-making course through to the next year but it won’t work in cash-strapped secondary schools.In the worst case scenario, time tables will be re-written every term
and courses will collapse with consequent disadvantage to students. As for bureaucracy, it will quadruple at the school level.
This change, along with the 20% increase in GST, will obliterate the Budget’s 4% increase in the operations grant so boards and teachers will need to continue to work together to expose what is simply a financial trick.
Achieving the best educational outcomes for students is the common goal of parents, boards and teachers
Parents and boards of trustees are our natural allies in a common pursuit of achieving the best educational outcomes for students. The “partnership between parents and the professionals” is never more important than when the provision of education comes under threat. Reviews are good if the intent is improvement of service, but all too often we see them lead to overall reductions in the education spend and reductions to professional input. Both of these then facilitate opportunities for business to make profitable inroads into the sector.
The health sector underwent a similar transformation which saw doctors and nurses kicked out of management and administrative posts in hospitals and replaced with generic managers trained in accountancy and business administration. The money changers have not only taken up permanent residence in the temple, they have also set up booths in schools and hospitals.
Communities and teachers working together can ensure access to high quality public education
For several reasons the agenda has been less successful in schools than in hospitals.
The successful battle that teachers and communities fought against bulk funding and site-based employment conditions meant that the notion of a fair and equal access to a high quality public service was not as comprehensively undermined in education as in health.
The illusion of the generic manager never really took off in schools. It is true that the requirements on principals to provide administrative and management leadership has come at the cost of professional leadership but that is still a far better compromise than bringing in financiers to make sub-prime decisions about education. I like to think that the overwhelming stroppiness of secondary teachers in the face of uninformed and incompetent leadership causes careerists to look for easier prey. Long may it continue.
Parents and schools in partnership
The most significant deviation from the neo-liberal plan for education was as a result of parental involvement. The assumption underpinning the change was that parents would take an adversarial approach to teachers and set about reducing their conditions to save money for the government. Instead, parents quickly found that devolution was a political scam which allowed governments to underfund schools while demanding better and better outcomes. Moreover, parents who play an active part in school governance come to appreciate how complex the issues around teaching and learning are and what a challenging job teaching really is.
There is no better example of the reality of the partnership model in schools than the practice boards follow of appointing extra teachers from the operations grant.
The most valuable asset a school has is its teachers
The economic theory of Tomorrow’s Schools was that boards should be bulk funded for both salary and operations in the expectation that they would be forced to reduce staff numbers (and eventually, as a result of site contracts, teachers’ pay) in order to pay the heat, light and water bill. The reverse has happened: boards have been quick to recognise that the most valuable asset a school has is its teachers. That is why the recent Budget has had another crack at valorising bulk funding by attempting to entice schools to cash-up unused staffing in order to make up for shortfalls in the operations grant.
Boards of trustees’ appreciation of the importance of adequate teacher to student ratios to effective classroom delivery might explain why the promised $50 million staffing cut did not eventuate in the Budget. Although that doesn’t mean that it won’t be implemented in a less direct way.
Published June 2010 issue of the PPTA News
 PPTA News archive
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