Posted by: blogger
on 12, Mar, 2010
Tagged in:
Tertiary Education Commission ,
TEC ,
PPTA Blog ,
Night classes ,
Ministry of Education ,
education spending ,
education politics ,
budget ,
Anne Tolley ,
Adult education ,
ACE
By Observer
This government doesn’t seem to have the slightest commitment to the idea that employers should act in good faith or that the State Sector Act 1988 (s77A) requires schools to “operate a personnel policy that complies with the principles of being a good employer”.
When it announced its poorly thought-through decision to can ACE (night schools) funding within the 2010 year, it appears to have had no clue as to how schools were meant to pay redundancy costs except that they should use whatever spare ACE money they had. Even a quick risk analysis would have told them that schools would not have enough to pay if the employees had had a lengthy period of employment.
Posted by: blogger
on 03, Jul, 2009
With the fast-approching nuclear Armageddon we were promised in the 1980s I mucked around at school. What was the point, I thought. A higher education wasn't going to do much to help me scavenge abandoned shopping malls for food during a nuclear winter should I survive the initial exchange of missiles, I thought. So I wagged Chemistry first, then English, then just about everything else.
By decade's end, and still with no missiles on the horizon, I began to gather my thoughts. Since leaving school I'd been fired from five dishwashing jobs in the space of a year. I was at the mercy of my own lack of enthusiasm for industrial detergent and an economic downturn. How did I let this happen? Oh, yeah ...
Humbly I trooped up to Victoria University's registry, showed them my (not-so-impressive) secondary grades and asked if there was any chance I could enroll. Half expecting to be directed back out the door, I was given a smile, advised to do a couple of night classes and come back. Thanks to the adult and community education (ACE) programme at Wellington High School I was able to embark on fruitful tertiary study, saving myself from myself and building a rewarding career in the process.
Posted by: blogger
on 22, Jun, 2009
By Winged Rodent
It's amazing how things change once you get elected.
Bill English is now brutally taking an axe to the night classes that, four years ago, he claimed gave a life-line to his own mother.
In a 2005 speech to CLASS (Community Learning Association through Schools) English used his Mum to illustrate a story about the important role community education played in society.
"I recall my mother going off to night-time classes in furniture restoration - a quite space in the busy life of a household of 12 children. There are a thousand stories about how human needs are met by the collective and aspirational activity of learning," he said.
English now plans to slash 80% of the funding to those same courses, leaving the remaining 20% to fund more ‘worthy' literacy and numeracy based classes.
But it gets better - in a 2006 press release he criticizes Labour for "destroying" night classes and argues they should be saved.
