Viewpoint of Robin Duff, President of the New Zealand Post Primary Teachers' Association / Te Wehengarua (PPTA), on the Budget 2011 and secondary education in New Zealand.
June 2011
Secondary education was not protected from 2011 Budget cuts
George Orwell was obviously thinking of the 2011 Budget, the masterpiece of political message and massage, when he said, “political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind”.
Bill English made a wild claim that education would be protected from cuts and would receive a boost in funding. Quantum physics might theorise about the existence of an alternative universe where this might be true, but it’s certainly not true in this dimension and especially untrue for secondary education.
The average increase across schools was 2.9% - inflation is running at 4.5%
Secondary schools will feel the pinch next year because inflation is running at 4.5% and an operations grant increase has been targeted at certain elements like roll growth, ICT, heat, lighting and water along with an increase to base funding. These all produce an average increase of 2.92% across all schools. This will be offset by the effect of quarterly funding which is predicted to remove $6 million per year from secondary schools.
Youth guarantee subsidises tertiary education at the expense of secondary education
There has been a huge funding boost for the youth guarantee with the creation of 7500 subsidised places in tertiary institutions at a cost of almost $200 million. The flow-on effect is better-funded tertiary providers have been given free-reign to poach senior students from secondary schools.
The government fondly imagines that youth guarantee places will go to students "for whom school is not the best environment", but long experience tells us that tertiary institutions will be actively seeking students who are already doing well and who have a good work ethic. They will meet the mandatory completion targets and thus, get more money next time. This means there will be a continuation of the New Zealand practice of dealing with problems as late as possible when the chances of success are least likely. It's no accident that we have more prisons per head of population than any other country, even the US.
Deficit excuse for cutting public service and using taxpayer funding to support private sector
The excuse for the total absence of strategy and vision in the Budget is the deficit. The minister of finance has made such a bogey out of it that there are probably New Zealanders who are afraid to leave their homes lest they fall into a deficit and are never heard of again.
I’m not denying New Zealand needs to reduce the size of the deficit but Bill is not being straight with us. We are not Portugal, Italy, Greece or Spain with government debt levels as a proportion of GDP of over 50% (110% in the case of Greece). In New Zealand, the problem is private debt which is over 100% as a percentage of GDP so why is Bill English pretending that cutting public services will reduce private debt?
He lectures public servants about not “waiting around for money to drop out of the sky”, but his own house is not in order. Money does drop out of the sky; it rains down on failed finance and insurance companies, it pours into tax cuts and sporting events and showers over construction companies and private schools.
Public private partnerships become core business for the Ministry of Education
The taxpayer is shelling out over $6 million to set up and develop a framework for building the first public-private partnership (PPP) secondary school which saves the taxpayer only $800,000 over 30 years. It requires the ministry of education to appoint a PPP project director and team to conduct the private sector lolly scramble. Since when did that become core business for the Ministry of Education – especially at a time when support for curriculum, assessment and learning has never been more stretched?
Government continues to fund private schools while using quarterly funding to undermine secondary schools
The minister of education is keen to give the private sector a hand out. She is entertaining requests from private schools like Wanganui Collegiate to have the taxpayer pick up their full salary and property maintenance costs while retaining their right to handpick their students.
Word is that the next cab off that secondary schools. particular rank is Auckland Dio.
By my calculations the minister could easily reverse the quarterly funding cuts and still have money left over if she simply refused to pick up the ongoing operating costs of these schools.
If she went further and spoke to her colleague, the Hon Pita Sharples, about the need to contain his tendency to constantly expand the number of tiny secondary kura, education spending could be genuinely increased.
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