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  • Kiwi kids are missing school rather than turn up with no lunch | Stuff.co.nz

    Children around the country are missing school rather than turn up with no lunch, because their families feel ashamed.

    People who work with food banks and schools say the problem has widened from beneficiaries to low-income families in which both parents work, sometimes more than one job, and still struggle to pay the bills.

    Representatives of the Salvation Army, Child Poverty Action Group, Public Health Association, KidsCan and NZ Educational Institute were all aware of children being kept at home by caregivers rather than go to school with no lunch.

    Jeni Cartwright of the Child Poverty Action Group says there is no reporting on the numbers of children who miss school days because they don’t have lunch, but the CPAG research paper Hunger for Learning described it as “common”.

    A Salvation Army spokesman says that when families are struggling to pay bills, the food shop is one of the first things to be trimmed.

    Every day families ask the Salvation Army’s Hamilton food bank for lunch box basics, such as muesli bars and bread, that children can take to school.

    KidsCan provides food for close to 30,000 children at decile 1 to 4 primary, intermediate and high schools each week. Chief executive Julie Chapman says the charity serves 675 schools and there are 40 more on the waiting list.

    Around 22 percent of the children at those schools would go hungry at some point during the week, up from 11 percent in 2011, she says.

    Read full article here.

  • Taranaki school principal resigns from increasingly stressful job.

    The principal of a top Taranaki school has resigned after 12 years in the role – and says other school leaders have congratulated him for getting out of an increasingly stressful profession.

    Charles Gibson is one of five Taranaki principals and deputy principals leaving their posts this year.

    While Gibson said he was mostly leaving Lepperton Primary School because it is “the right time to do something a little different”, he warned the stresses of the job, national standards, and a lack of respect for teachers from the Ministry of Education had all been contributing factors and were putting others off taking up top positions.

    “Many teachers and principals are feeling increasingly undermined not only by government and MOE but by some who feel they know better about how children learn.”

    He would like to see the end of national standards, he said.

    “Have the MOE support and respect us. Part of their brief should be to make our job easier. We need more wraparound support for our children at risk without having to spend ten hours on an application.

    “One of the biggest frustrations I have had is with the MOE and the rebuilding of our new school. It has been about eight years since approval and in that time it keeps going over budget and still not a single piece of dirt has been overturned.”

    Read full article here.

  • New Domain Name

    Welcome to UnleashEducation.co.nz

    It’s here! Finally, after many months of deliberation, we have bit the bullet and purchased the domain name “unleasheducation.co.nz”. We haven’t updated the website any to match however, as some have come to expect, as we’re quite happy with the design we have currently.

    So update your bookmarks, share out the links, tell your family and friends, and check it out to make sure it all works!

    Enjoy!

  • No More Sense from Seymour

    And so it begins.

    The non-sensical dribble spews forth from the under-secretary of Education, who gets into a lucrative position on the back of one electorate described on Wikipedia as an “exclusive, affluent suburb of Auckland”.

    That’s right. Mr. Seymour is at it again as he launches the ACT Party campaign.

    We will pay good teachers more. And great ones even more. No doubt David will be the judge as to which teachers make good teachers and which ones make great ones. I would put money on schools not being able to decide that themselves, and even more money on it being based on student results i.e. National Standards ala Performance Pay.

    Of course, one can see his point when he opens with the statement that the average teacher is paid a pittance, and deserve to be paid more.

    To fix that, the party is proposing an extra $1 billion in funding for education. “ACT’s proposed good teacher grants will give your average teacher a pay rise of $20,000 per year,” Mr Seymour claimed.

    But to receive the extra money, schools “need to opt out of the centralised payroll system and collective agreements”.

    This has rubbed a lot of people (in particular teachers) up the wrong way. No surprises there.

    But here’s why his solution makes no sense.

    Hypothetically Synonymous Seymoronous

    Let’s assume that schools go for this, and EVERY school in the country pays their teachers an average of $20,000 per year more than they are already. That is going to cost a lot.

    However, none of that has anything to do with collective agreements, the unions, or any centralised payroll system. They are not synonymous with each other.

    It’s illogical.

    In fact, under Seymour’s scheme, teachers could stay in the union with the collective agreement, and they could still get paid $20,000 more if he really means it; just get a new collective agreement ratified between the government and the union, or have both – give a bit more to schools to ‘top up’ teacher salaries that are paid through the collective agreement. It’s only because ACT are notoriously anti-union that he is dangling the carrot for principals and teachers to consider.

    Pay more Seymour

    The second factor is that given the current climate in education, there are teachers leaving in droves, and not always because they aren’t being paid enough. On many occasions, the workload is too much. Refer to this article in March. As a teacher, like many others, I would probably take less workload over getting paid more to ‘compensate’ for the increased workload that is currently expected of us.

    In Conclusion

    While paying teachers more is a genuinely nice touch, Mr. S, if you really cared and were really in touch with the education sector, and you actually wanted to value teachers, then maybe the first step is to work with the union rather than trying to sabotage it into non-existence.

    Illogical. Blackmail. Numpty.

     

  • Four in five Christchurch primary schoolers exhibit PTSD symptoms, study finds | Stuff.co.nz

    Up to 80 per cent of Christchurch 5-year-olds are showing post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms, research shows.

    Source: Four in five Christchurch primary schoolers exhibit PTSD symptoms, study finds

    As many as four in five Christchurch primary schoolers are exhibiting symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), a local study has found.

    Children who started school in the years after the Canterbury earthquakes were “neurologically different” – and a city-wide focus on resilience has only deepened the crisis, researchers Kathleen Liberty and Maureen Allan found.

    The 300 children in the study were five times more likely to exhibit symptoms of PTSD than other Kiwi children. Eighty per cent had at least one symptom and a third exhibited at least six of 12 symptoms. About a third had eight or more behavioural problems.

    Strategies to address the problem suggested by Liberty and Allan have achieved a 27 per cent decrease in behavioural issues since February 2016, sparking “an explosion of interest” in their five-year project, the pair said. Since May, 11 schools and kindergartens had signed up for a duplicate study.

    University of Canterbury associate professor Liberty and Resource Teacher Learning and Behaviour (RTLB) manager Allan teamed up for the study after noticing differences in 2012’s new entrants.

    Read more…

  • Winter is coming

    Other things than teacher shortages that can be blamed on the winter season…

    • Charter schools aren’t really working because it’s winter…
    • Winter is largely responsible for Māori student underachievement…
    • Overcrowded homes with multiple families living under one roof is only a factor because of winter…
    • There is no mental health crisis, it’s just winter…
    • Cold and damp living situations only happen because of winter…
    • Underfunding schools happens because of each year’s winter…
    • House prices are only high because it’s winter…
    • Teacher stress and workload is only an issue because of winter…
    • Winter causes families to want to live in cars…
    • There is no child poverty, it’s just winter…
    • Youth suicide. Winter…
    • Terrorism. Winter…
    • North Korea vs. US. Winter…
    • Titanic, Hindenburg, Tangiwai, Wahine. Winter…

     

    In response to: There isn’t really a teacher shortage…

  • National Standards Plus

    Seriously. How ridiculous?

    Mum is running late for work, driving over the hill to her 9 til 5 job in the city centre. A notification comes through on her phone at 9:01am, and although she knows she shouldn’t, she checks her phone anyway. The message preview reads “Sally Burgess*: Reading – Below, Writing – Below, Mathematics – Wel…” before it gets truncated to fit on the screen. Opening it up to see the $45 million dollar app in all it’s glory, Mum forgets about the upcoming corner and drives off the road into the fence of the unfortunate homeowner. This instantly lands her in hospital. It could have been so much worse though. She probably counts herself lucky not to have plowed through multiple crowds of children at the local school 300 metres down the road.

    That’s right. The government would have parents being updated in real time every and any progress their child is making in National Standards throughout the school day.

    They’re calling this ‘National Standards Plus’, largely because of the additional time and energy that is going to be chewing into teachers already busy schedule. The additional testing, the additional data gathering, the additional reporting and notifying and uploading to the app’s system. All this PLUS actually teaching the children.

    National Standards Plus would allow parents to track their child’s progress in more detail online.

    “We will show you your child’s progress on your mobile phone, English said. “Some schools have already rolled out tools that support this approach.

    – Stuff, 28 August 2017

     

    The benefit to this will be of course that parents are kept up to date with their child’s progress as it happens.

    Of course, to get this, teachers will be required to input data as it happens. Which will have to be regularly for it to be a worthwhile app to keep on your phone. So now instead of teaching, teachers will be in a constant state of testing, assessing, marking and upload results to the app, for each and every child in their class, each and every day.

    What the government is forgetting however, is the cost of equipping each classroom in the country with one of these:

    Osbourne:  Portable Scale, Wide, Digital.

    Whether you are weighing market hogs to capture packer premiums or weighing show pigs, goats, or lambs, the Osborne ACCU-ARM Portable Scale offers the most “rock solid” portable weighing system available. The solid, animal-friendly scale uses precision levers to reduce sway and bounce and is completely cable free! With Osborne, the entire weighing operation is more efficient and less stressful for both you and your livestock!

    This scale features standard side panels, side-opening gates, a wheel kit for easy transportation, and a weighing meter with digital read out. The scale platform is 20 in. (51 cm) wide and the scale weighs animals up to 500 lbs. (227 kg).

    Find out more here.

    Using these scales to weigh the pigs is one thing, but teaching children so that there is progress to notify parents about is another.

    Labour education spokesman Chris Hipkins said National was ‘”doubling down” on its National Standards system which was not improving student achievement.

    “Kids in New Zealand are over assessed. What we need is less reporting, more teaching.”

    And he questioned how teachers would find the time to update assessment records for continual online access.

    Education union the NZEI said plans to spend millions building a computer tool to track children’s progress as it happened,” based on shonky National Standards, is an obsession with data gone mad”.

    “Requiring teachers to input standardised assessment data across a range of subjects in real time for 30 or more students in a class will reduce the time teachers have with children and increase children’s anxiety about learning,” NZEI Te Riu Roa President Lynda Stuart says.

    “No parent wants their child’s teacher sitting entering data for hours when they need to be face to face with kids.”

    Seriously. How ridiculous?

    Oink.

     

    In relation to – Stuff – National launches official campaign with education bid

  • Education policy won’t tackle the big issues | Stuff.co.nz

    The National Party is showing it is completely out of touch with schools by offering up an education policy that misses the chance to fix crucial issues in the sector, say principals and teachers.

    The plan is part of the four-pronged $380 million education plan revealed by leader Bill English and education spokesperson Nikki Kaye yesterday.

    But Principals’ Federation president Whetu Cormick was less than impressed.

    He said the sector just had a new digital curriculum dumped on their laps in June.

    “At the moment we’ve got about 4000 teachers who are ready, out of 100,000 of us, to do this curriculum.

    “Now we’ve got another idea of languages, pouring in precious millions of dollars into this idea that’s come completely out of left field, just reflects that our Prime Minister’s out of touch.

    “There aren’t enough teachers around to teach our rich curriculum and the basics of reading, writing and maths.”

    His biggest gripe was that the money was not going to be spent where it was desperately needed.

    “We’ve got big, big issues with severe behaviours. Children who are affected by methamphetamine parents, their addictions. They’re causing some concerns in our schools. We’re hearing from our colleagues, principals across the country … they’re at breaking point.”

    Read full article from Jacob McSweeny here: RadioNZ

  • Future of education in NZ for National freightrain

    In response to NZ Herald – Every child’s chance to learn second language: National’s education policy – 27 August 2017.

    Whilst some schools are struggling to get students to learn a first language, we’ll be teaching them coding and a second language as well should National get through to it’s fourth consecutive term.

    National Standards will be extended.

    And low and behold, surprise, surprise, they will be pumping money into improving the teaching of maths to primary schools.

    Seriously. When will they get the message?

    The second part of the package was a $126 million investment to raise maths achievement for primary school students. English said National Standards showed New Zealand needed to lift its game in maths. “So we’ll provide our students and teachers with the tools they need to do that… We’ll help 1200 teachers a year complete extra university papers targeted at teaching maths to primary students… We’ll also provide intensive classroom support for students, where schools have identified the need to improve their maths.”

    Obviously teachers are the reason students aren’t achieving in Mathematics. Rubbish teachers and ineffective teaching. Ignore the fact that there are other factors at play for many students, it MUST be the useless teachers we have that are failing our students.

    So to fix this problem, we’ll send teachers back to university to learn how to teach Mathematics more effectively by ex-teachers-turn-lecturers who couldn’t hack it in the classroom 15 years ago with some kind of trendy fad way of teaching. Probably after school, in teacher’s own time.

    Teachers work out of their skin. Anyone who has visited schools that are supposedly ‘struggling’ knows that there are other factors in any underachievement.

    It’s made even more a joke when you begin to look at the reason behind such a policy. A simple search on our favourite search engine shows that Education Counts has the data for National Standards Results, 2016 (PDF). On the very first graph of this document we see that Reading sits at 77.8%, Maths at 75.4% and 71.2% for Writing. So why are we targeting Maths?

    Quite simple actually.

    Maths is the easiest to address. It has a ‘right’ and a ‘wrong’. It’s measurable. It’s quantifiable. It’s the easiest to show progress. It’s assessments are stable and data rich. This is something that Reading and Writing don’t have, being largely subjective – especially Writing. The government want to ride on some success. By investing in Mathematics and measuring the future success of their education budget, they can prove that National Standards work, and legitimise all three subjects.

    However, what teachers really want, and really need, are some resources, assessments, and some structure around how Writing is assessed and taught, and to see how this can impact on all other subjects (including Mathematics). Pumping more money into Mathematics is an easy out for the Government, whilst appearing that they are putting in resources and funding into education before an election, whilst in reality, they are plugging a hole that isn’t leaking (or not leaking as much).

    Are any teacher’s actually excited about this? About having more money put into Mathematics, even after ALiM and other initiatives? About the prospect of having to go back to complete some additional university papers?

  • Primary schools to measure student progress

    In response to https://beehive.govt.nz/release/primary-schools-measure-student-progress – August 26, 2017.

    Measure. Measure. Measure. Weigh. Weigh. Weigh. Data. Data. Data.

    “The Government has made a decision to shift towards a system that measures student progress, alongside National Standards / Ngā Whanaketanga Rumaki Māori, to help ensure every student gets the support they need to achieve…
    Monitoring student progress gives teachers more data on which to tailor learning plans for their students – and we want to roll this out to all primary schools and kura.”

    says Education Minister Nikki Kaye.

    More data. More weighing. More testing. More assessment.

    Guess what. Teacher’s already monitor progress. I can show you the progress each of my students are making (or not making) in each of the three big subjects that now dominate the New Zealand Curriculum. Obviously not enough though.

    “Measuring progression means teachers will be able to see how far children have come in the specific learning areas that make up National Standards.”

    In some regards, it is good that the Minister has acknowledged what teachers have been saying for a while. Some students make incredible progress within a year, but are still below or well below the expected standard set by the Standards.

    “The change also reflects the education sector’s observation that we don’t adequately show a student’s progress over time, particularly for students who may be below the standard, and this will help address that.”

    This is all well and good, but as schools have come to know through the berading from ERO and senior advisers, progress don’t mean jack when it comes to achievement, which is all ‘the Ministry’ and ERO actually care about. 85% At or Above. 85%. 85%. 85%.

    Ultimately however, this will actually just lead to the mandatory use of PaCT.

    To support teachers the Ministry of Education has developed progress tools, such as Learning Progression Frameworks, the Progress and Consistency Tool and Whakatupuranga, that help show how children are doing and how they can progress. These have been developed in a number of areas including reading, writing, maths and digital technologies.

    The Government wants to roll out tools like these to all primary schools and kura as evidence shows they deliver real benefits for teachers and kaiako, by streamlining paperwork and reducing their reporting workload.

    There has been copious amounts written about PaCT and it’s potential. Just have a look at the following

    Education continues down this reform, with National determined on making National Standards legitimate.