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.
Any organisation where Cameron Bagrie is the chair I’ll pay attention to.
Apart from his in-built advantages of being a proud son of Central Otago and an old boy of Waitaki Boys’ High School, he’s been a beacon of economic commonsense in this country for 20 years.
One of his long standing mantra is that “if you want to see the state of a nation’s economy in 30 years, look at its education system and achievement now”.
Like many of us he’s looked on with dismay as our educational standards, as measured by international testing, have slipped dramatically this century.
Recent PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) results point at least to a slight turnaround.
To recap, in the year 2000 New Zealand was fifth on the overall list combining maths, reading and science.
By 2012 we’d slipped to 20th but last year we’d climbed back up to 10th.
Amidst all the various contributors to the education system and policies – politicians, teacher unions and bureaucrats – there’s one group that has till now never had a voice or been able to offer ideas as to how and what children are taught – their parents.
Hence the formation of a new education lobby group: The Parents Alliance, of which Bagrie is the inaugural chair.
The organisation, launching officially on Tuesday, 22 September, has lined up some heavy hitters and well-connected types to make the parents’ case in the education of their children.
The core values of The Parents Alliance are these:
- Ensuring educational achievement and progress for students is the top priority for our schools.
- Ensuring teachers are well trained and ready for the classroom.
- School reports are meaningful.
- There must be more early support for those from economically disadvantaged backgrounds.
- There needs to be fewer zoning barriers for high schools, meaning parents can send their child to the one most appropriate.
- An insistence that schools are surveyed annually by the parents, so that schools know what they must do to improve.
It’s hardly radical policy, yet for many parents it’s far from reality.
The Parents Alliance appears to be the brainchild of Wellington mother Anya Zohrab, a former parliamentary staffer for Annette King and David Seymour.
She’s tapped her Wellington network well, getting not just Bagrie on board but also pollster and Taxpayers’ Union co-founder David Farrar, former Labour cabinet minister turned Insurance Council boss Kris Faafoi and two other businesswomen and mothers, Cat Moody and Joanne Chaplow.
I don’t know the political leanings of the last two but having Faafoi as a board member alongside Bagrie and Farrar assumes this is a non-partisan outfit with only education outcomes in mind and that the needs and wishes of parents are an integral part of the way schools are run.
So far just under 3000 supporters have signed up at parentsalliance.nz.
I’m a father of three and grandfather seven. As the son of school teachers, the value of education was always a given in our house growing up.
I like to think that value was passed on to my children as they grew up and I watched on proudly as they accumulated six university degrees between them.
(I hasten to say that’s six more than their old man.)
But looking back to their school days in the ’80s and ’90s, i remember – perhaps with rose tinted glasses – easy access for me as a parent to any of their schools at any time for any reservations I might have had about my children’s progress or learning.
Now I hear things from and about my New Zealand grandchildren (two are in London) which really make me wonder about the direction primary education especially is taking.
The worst story of all is of my Wellington granddaughter doing her only maths for the week at 2pm on a Friday afternoon.
Soon after the young lady’s parents removed her from that school.
As Cameron Bagrie says, the teacher unions have carried far too much influence for far too long in education.
Having the likes of Bagrie, Farrar and Faafoi pushing the case for what parents need and deserve in education can only be a good thing.
This article was originally published on the author’s Substack.
