Peter Williams
Writer and broadcaster for half a century. Now watching from the sidelines although verbalising thoughts on www.reality check.radio three days a week
Paul Henry always had a knack for cutting to the chase. That’s why his succinct line about ACT’s education discipline policy will hit the spot with so many teachers.
“Let’s be honest, there are a lot of little shits in classrooms and we need to address that if we’re to lift education standards.”
So ACT want to give teachers more power to throw the little shits out of the class.
How many teachers around the country will be saying ‘amen’ to that. Only under their breath and very quietly of course, because their unions – you know the ones that support the Labour Party – think this is an appalling and unworkable policy.
They want “more learning support, more mental health support, and we need to make sure our children are supported and cared for”.
Whatever that means.
The unions seem to believe there isn’t really a problem.
Except ACT points to a 2024 Education Review Office report which shows half of teachers dealt with a disruption issue every lesson and 47 per cent said they lost up to 50 minutes a day managing challenging behaviour.
It’s a bit like ACT’s policy on attendance. After all, the most obvious truism of all is this: if you’re not at school you can’t be learning. An uneducated population quickly becomes a very poor one, in every sense of the word.
Regular attendance at school, that is being there 90 per cent of the time, increased to 68.8 per cent in the first term this year from a low of 53 per cent in 2023. That’s still not flash but it’s way better than it was.
A good deal of that increase has to do with David Seymour’s attendance action plan which, like the discipline policy, includes financial penalties for parents who don’t meet their responsibilities.
One case of parental slackness has been brought under those new rules. It was in, where else, the eastern Bay of Plenty. The outcome was predictable – the parent didn’t show up to court. Some people are just useless.
The ACT discipline policy is another link in a chain of initiatives which can only improve our education standards.
Most of them are blindingly obvious moves back to methods that had been successful for a hundred years before new philosophies on teaching began to emerge in the 1970s and ’80s.
The MLEs, modern learning environments or open-plan classrooms, were a disaster. Child-centred learning was a failure. An unstructured and knowledge-poor curriculum was shambolic.
Thankfully they’re being stepped back as we desperately seek to return to the positions on education achievement tables we occupied only a quarter of a century ago.
Removing phones from kids during school hours is another significant move.
Surely it was proved during the golden years of New Zealand educational achievement – that is the century or so from the Education Act of 1877 – that best results are achieved through structure and discipline.
Any parent just knows this instinctively.
Getting the “little shits” out of the classroom fits nicely into a toolbox of ideas which will appear retrograde to those of a progressive persuasion.
But our education standards have deteriorated markedly this century. Trends of improvement are encouraging.
This latest ACT policy is worth a go to keep up the momentum.
This article was originally published on the author’s Substack.
