Tag: education

  • Parents want teachers parenting

    Care provider. Call centre operator. Kitchen hand. Negotiator. Detective. Judge. Medic. Counsellor. Social worker. Psychologist. Personal trainer. Caretaker. Cleaner. Don’t get me started on the numerous things that teachers have to do each and every day. That’s even before they have to teach a class full of students some Maths, English, Science, Technology, Music, Art, Dance, Drama, Social Science, and Languages.

    Original article: New Zealand schools need to teach more life skills.

    Kiwi parents want more life skills taught in school, a new survey shows.

    From cyber safety to sex education and manners, two-thirds of parents believed it was the responsibility of teachers to impart lessons traditionally handled at home, according to a survey of 500 New Zealand families.

    Ethnicity played a role in what parents regarded as important in a public education, with Asian parents more likely to want schools to handle the teaching of life skills.

    Parents perceived schools’ responsibilities increased in secondary school.

    But Post Primary Teachers’ Association (PPTA) junior vice president Melanie Webber said that while teachers were role models, it would be difficult to fit more life skills into the curriculum.

    The study by the Australian Scholarships Group (ASG) and Melbourne’s Monash University found a “social shift” away from valuing scholastic success towards a more holistic education, ASG chief executive John Velegrinis said.

    “There are increasingly blurred lines as to where (teacher responsibility begins and ends as parents’ perceptions of their traditional roles and responsibilities change.”

    Asian amilies viewed education more traditionally and set higher standards for their children’s academic success than Pākehā parents.

    About 92 per cent believed a degree would help their child achieve their ambitions and 38 per cent did not think their child could be distracted from learning.

    Just 18 per cent of Pākehā families felt that way about distractions and only 66 per cent said they set “high standards” for their child’s education or agreed a degree was important to their success.

    Asian families overwhelmingly supported schools teaching more about social skills and public behaviour (91 and 88 per cent respectively), with about 42 per cent of Pākehā parents on board.

    Christchurch mother Michele Fantham said she wanted daughters Bella, 10, and Neve, 6, to be taught social skills and financial literacy at their school, Fernside.

    “I think the curriculum is pretty cram-packed full of lots of things the school or Ministry (of Education) think are really important that are just not going to benefit them in the real world.”

    She was concerned technology impacted children’s ability to “use manners and communicate properly”. She was among a third of Kiwi parents who believed teaching cyber safety was a school’s responsibility.

    Read more.

    Source: https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/education/97798269/new-zealand-schools-need-to-teach-more-life-skills-parents-say

     

  • How Canada became an education superpower | BBC

    I found this article and was amazed by it, given the fact that Canada actually approached New Zealand and borrowed aspects of our Curriculum for their use. They developed a selection of ideas from it, but largely, their education curriculum is modelled off ours.

    Then, it would seem, we brought in National Standards, and they didn’t. Look what happened!

    When there are debates about the world’s top performing education systems, the names that usually get mentioned are the Asian powerhouses such as Singapore and South Korea or the Nordic know-alls, such as Finland or Norway.

    But with much less recognition, Canada has climbed into the top tier of international rankings.

    In the most recent round of international Pisa tests, Canada was one of a handful of countries to appear in the top 10 for maths, science and reading.

    The tests, run by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), are a major study of educational performance and show Canada’s teenagers as among the best educated in the world.

    They are far ahead of geographical neighbours such as the US and European countries with strong cultural ties like the UK and France.

    At university level, Canada has the world’s highest proportion of working-age adults who have been through higher education – 55% compared with an average in OECD countries of 35%.

    Migrant students

    Canada’s success in school tests is also very unusual compared with other international trends.

    The top performers are often cohesive, compact societies and the current highest achiever, Singapore, has been seen as a model of systematic progress, with each part of the education system integrated into an overarching national strategy.

    Canada does not even really have a national education system, it is based on autonomous provinces and it is hard to think of a bigger contrast between a city state such as Singapore and a sprawling land mass such as Canada.

    The OECD, trying to understand Canada’s success in education, described the role of the federal government as “limited and sometimes non-existent”.

    Also not widely recognised is that Canada has a high level of migrants in its school population.

    More than a third of young adults in Canada are from families where both parents are from another country.

    But the children of newly-arrived, migrant families seem to integrate rapidly enough to perform at the same high level as their classmates.

    Read more here.

    Source: http://www.bbc.com/news/business-40708421

     

  • The pendulum swings back on school tests | BBC

    Let’s hope that NZ Government can make the change before they have to go back on this. Let’s ditch any National based assessment for primary schoolers. It’s too much. Too much pressure on the children. Too much pressure on the teachers. All for what? Thankfully the UK Government are beginning to see that what they’re doing isn’t helping…

    30 March 2017

    If news stories could have a soundtrack, then this scrapping of tests in the early years of primary school would have the creaking sound of a pendulum slowly swinging back.

    The Department for Education is proposing that national curriculum tests taken by seven-year-olds in England could be ditched.

    Instead there would be an assessment of five-year-olds by a teacher – a so-called “baseline test” – which would be used as a starting point for measuring progress through primary school.

    It represents a step backwards from more and more testing – a shift in attitude as much as policy.

    And it raises again the thorny question of what kind of tests young children should face in primary school.

    Are such tests a helpful indicator for identifying pupils’ needs? Or are they an unnecessary pressure – a case of too much, too young? And are such tests going to mean a paper mountain of extra bureaucracy for teachers, hindering rather than helping learning?

    ‘Hope over experience’

    The teachers’ unions have broadly given their support to the government’s announcement to row back on the tests for seven year olds in reading, writing, maths and science.

    But the National Union of Teachers still says the idea of a baseline test for four or five-year-olds remains a “triumph of hope over experience”.

    The teachers’ union questions whether this can ever be a sufficiently reliable test to be used as a fixed point against which to measure all the following years of a child’s progress.

    But the counter-argument to this is that you have to start somewhere.

    If schools are to be held to account for how much progress children have made by the age of 11 – then it has to be measured against a starting point.

    And isn’t the natural starting point in the first year?

    There is also a strong argument that it is the low achievers and the disadvantaged who will be most in need of the extra help that a test might identify.

    And at the last general election, all three main political parties were sympathetic to the principle of baseline testing.

    But the announcement on testing also raises another great back and forth of the education pendulum. How much data is too much?

    Parents’ evenings, with spreadsheets and targets, can feel like a chat with the accountants.

    And for the schools themselves, the accumulation and analysis of data has become a major part of their working lives.

    Read more here.

    Source: http://www.bbc.com/news/education-39444999

  • Kids arriving at school in nappies

    Primary and early childhood teachers have asked the Government to let them divert money away from expert teachers to provide extra support for needy kids.

    Teachers’ union, the NZ Educational Institute, has asked the Ministry of Education to let schools and early childhood centres use some of the extra $359 million tagged for “communities of learning” to create “roles supporting children with learning challenges”.

    The communities, usually groups of six to a dozen schools, have money to pay up to 900 “expert teachers” to help other teachers in the group to meet “achievement challenges”, which have been mainly focused on literacy and numeracy, and pass rates in the National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA).

    The institute opposed the initiative when the Government proposed it in 2014 because it was seen as a step towards performance pay – paying expert teachers more than others.

    But it eventually agreed to participate when the extra pay was limited to $8000 a year for expert teachers working within their own schools and $16,000 for those working across all the schools in their group, but with an agreement to review the scheme with the ministry this year.

    Institute executive member Virginia Oakly has told the conference in Rotorua that the ministry has agreed to give the communities some extra flexibility.

    But a review report, which the institute and the ministry had hoped to sign off last week before the conference, has not yet been agreed on because the ministry has not been willing to “stretch” the model as far as the institute wants.

    A main theme at the conference has been that teachers want more support for growing numbers of children who are violent and disruptive because of unsettled home lives, and many schools are reporting children starting school not yet toilet-trained and still in nappies.

    Former institute president Louise Green said the institute wanted ​to use the extra funding for communities of learning “more directly to support children’s needs rather than on allowances for a few rigidly prescribed roles”.

    But the institute “made no progress with the ministry on this issue”.

    President Lynda Stuart said teachers needed hands-on help from specialists who could work with needy children and their families, freeing the teachers to teach other children in their classes.

    “We want to see specialist frontline support that can go in and support teachers and schools – frontline ministry people, psychologists, speech/language therapists, occupational therapists, behaviour specialists,” she said.

    Read more here.

    Source: http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=11929058

  • 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…

  • 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?

  • Hekia will not stand for re-election in 2017


    Goodbye.

    In relation to: Hekia Parata not standing in next year’s election

  • Prison Beds or Educated Society

    Two point five billion dollars.

    $2.5 billion dollars.

    $2,500,000,000.00

    That’s a lot of dollar coins.

    Let me tell you what they will spend it on.

    No. Not fixing the poverty problem sweeping the country. No. Not assisting children living in impoverished situations. No. Not sorting out the public health situation with junior doctors striking today. No. Not addressing the lack of funding in mental health with suicide prevention and support.

    So, after earlier this week scrutinising that crime is caused by poverty, rather than address the poverty situation that is staring everyone in the face (and not likely to go away just because you keep staring back), Judith Collins and her cronies announce that $1 billion of that cash injection will be used to create living arrangements for an additional 1800 inmates.

    To put those numbers into perspective; that’s $555,555.55 per bed. Five hundred and fifty five and a half THOUSAND dollars per room with a bed and a pan. To contain another criminal.

    Backwards

    For me, it’s non-sensical. It’s backwards. It’s purely responsive, rather than proactive.

    EVERY piece of research out there suggests that there is strong links between poverty and crime, as well as, education and crime. Surely (or is it just me) crime PREVENTION is a better use of money than catering for an increase of criminals into the system?

    You can’t prevent crime; but with strong links between poverty, education and the outcome of crime, then surely dealing with poverty and education is where the focus needs to be?

    If you are educated, then you know to read and write, you’re more likely to be able to get a job, you are more likely to be able to hold down a job, and the less likely you are to find yourself needing to get into trouble.

    And I’m not even an expert in the field. I haven’t had to research this. It is pure, bloody common sense. and logical thinking.

    There are currently 9,798 inmates in the current corrections system (Sept 2016).

    Let’s divide that spending out per inmate (I’ll even include the additional 1,800 inmates that these extra beds will allow for!)

    $2,500,000,000 / 11,598 = $215,554.40NZD per inmate

    Now, that is spread out over ‘about 5 years’.

    $215,554.40 / 5 = $43,110.88NZD per inmate, per year.

    That’s an ADDITIONAL forty three thousand dollars per inmate each year for the next five years, including the extra 1,800 inmates that they are supposedly catering for.

    Currently, in education, spending on each student is $7,046.00.

    Let’s see those numbers next to each other.

    Inmates Students
    $43,110 $7,046

    What an absolute joke. Remember, the blue area in the graphs is what the corrections system is getting ON TOP OF the additional funding provided in the current budget already.

    Earlier in 2015, the Government announced a generous $359 million boost into the Education sector, but in a very restrictive way of schools being cajoled into CoL’s (Communities of Learning). To compare this with the $2.5 billion it’s just embarrassing. Here’s the graph for that as a comparison between what the Government is prepared to spend as ‘extra’. As a picture, it’s ridiculously similar to the current funding for students compared with the additional funding Corrections is getting.

     

     

    United States has this problem: Not one State spends more on student education than it does for incarceration.

    Source: http://money.cnn.com/infographic/economy/education-vs-prison-costs/

     

    Now; don’t get me wrong. I am not here for a second suggesting that corrections does not need support; nor am I saying anything about how or where they spend their money. They have a job to do, and certain criminals do need “restricting in their day-to-day activities”, but lets start to look at solutions for the problem, rather than just catering for it.

    Let’s buy sunscreen rather than melanoma treatments.

    Let’s fix the hole in the bucket rather than filling it up time and time again.

    Let’s put a fence at the top of the cliff rather than an ambulance at the bottom.

    Let’s start investing in children, the next generation, the education of people, poverty, and homelessness rather than catering for the criminals that they will likely become because we continue to ignore the impact education and poverty are having on society today.