10. ANNE TOLLEY (National—East Coast) Link to this
to the Minister of Education
Is he satisfied with the performance of our education system, in light of the findings in the Business New Zealand election survey 2008 that 72 percent of respondents believe that the education system is not meeting the skill needs of business; if so, why?
Hon CHRIS CARTER (Minister of Education) Link to this
Yes; by international standards, such as the Programme for International Student Assessment scoring, New Zealand students are performing at near the top level of students in other OECD countries. However, for some New Zealand students, our current secondary school programmes are not working. That is why the Labour-led Government is introducing the revolutionary Schools Plus programme for those who are not succeeding, not boot camps as suggested by Mr John Key in January this year.
Does the Minister agree with the Post Primary Teachers Association (PPTA) that the numeracy requirements for the National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA) level 1 reflect “a very low level of achievement”, and that they are not “likely to match the community’s expectation of numeracy at year 11”; if so, why are we sending our school leavers away with a high school qualification for a knowledge of maths that everyone agrees we should expect of intermediate school pupils?
I would not agree with that. Nor would I agree with the PPTA’s comment, recently reported on the front page of the New Zealand Herald, that the NCEA was too hard.
Hon Mark BurtonTo return to the original question, what other reports has the Minister seen about the findings of Business New Zealand’s election survey 2008?
I have seen a very interesting comment: that 94 percent of the businesses surveyed also wanted there to be a stronger focus on apprenticeships and industry training. The House will no doubt remember that the last National Government abolished the apprenticeship system when it was in office. Indeed, in 2000, 81,000 New Zealanders were in industry training. Today, 185,000 people are accessing industry training. Another 15,051 people are training in the restored Modern Apprenticeships programme, brought in by the Labour-led Government.
Does the Minister agree with the Education Review Office report that says that when it comes to our underachievers “The area where we are least effective is in identifying these students.”; if so, why will he not support National’s national standards policy, which identifies those underachievers at primary school, to ensure they have the help they need in order to bring them up to national standards in reading, writing, and numeracy so they will have every opportunity to make a good life for themselves?
I am very confident that our primary and middle schools have very effective assessment processes for identifying students who are not succeeding. Discredited internationally is standardised testing. It is rejected in the UK and elsewhere; teachers teach towards those tests. I want to see our schools use tests that identify what students need to know, not what they already know. Those are the modern assessment processes, and those are the sorts of processes that are happening in our schools.