Cast in that light, Vote Education did well. While the ‘fees-free’ year for tertiary students was cancelled and, like most government departments, education agencies will have to trim about 12% of their spending over four years, education as a whole came out ahead. In addition to reallocated savings, about $1 billion in new money will be spent on educational essentials over four years.
The fees-free policy was a failure on its own terms – it has done nothing to boost university enrolments for young people from disadvantaged backgrounds. And few educators will mourn cuts to their government agencies, especially when the savings, along with those from the fees-free scheme, will be reinvested in classrooms, teaching resources and professional development.
Many schools have not seen significant investment in their buildings for decades. Most recent classroom builds are large, open-plan rooms designed to be used by multiple teachers and dozens of students working in groups. Their architecture makes whole-class teaching challenging. The budget allocated about $500 million for building new classrooms and modifying those not fit for purpose.
Two other large allocations will support the government’s curriculum reforms. These are about $80 million for new curriculum resources and about $85 million for vocational education.
A massive amount of work has gone into developing a new, knowledge-rich curriculum for New Zealand’s schools. But there is little point in writing a great curriculum if teachers can’t use it. The new resources will help them bring the new curriculum to life in their classrooms.
An exciting feature of the new curriculum will be ‘industry-led’ subjects for Years 12 and 13. For the first time, secondary vocational education will have formal curricula. Spending on vocational education includes funding for Industry Skills Boards to develop those curricula.
Trades Academies are partnerships between secondary schools and tertiary providers to provide secondary students with opportunities for vocational education that schools alone can’t offer. They will be instrumental in delivering industry-led subjects. Funding for Trades Academies was doubled in the budget. While the scheme remains capped, this is a big step in the right direction.
In fiscally difficult times, it is great that the government is still investing in the future.
Dr Michael Johnston has held academic positions at Victoria University of Wellington for the past ten years. He holds a PhD in Cognitive Psychology from the University of Melbourne. This article was published HERE
Many schools have not seen significant investment in their buildings for decades. Most recent classroom builds are large, open-plan rooms designed to be used by multiple teachers and dozens of students working in groups. Their architecture makes whole-class teaching challenging. The budget allocated about $500 million for building new classrooms and modifying those not fit for purpose.
Two other large allocations will support the government’s curriculum reforms. These are about $80 million for new curriculum resources and about $85 million for vocational education.
A massive amount of work has gone into developing a new, knowledge-rich curriculum for New Zealand’s schools. But there is little point in writing a great curriculum if teachers can’t use it. The new resources will help them bring the new curriculum to life in their classrooms.
An exciting feature of the new curriculum will be ‘industry-led’ subjects for Years 12 and 13. For the first time, secondary vocational education will have formal curricula. Spending on vocational education includes funding for Industry Skills Boards to develop those curricula.
Trades Academies are partnerships between secondary schools and tertiary providers to provide secondary students with opportunities for vocational education that schools alone can’t offer. They will be instrumental in delivering industry-led subjects. Funding for Trades Academies was doubled in the budget. While the scheme remains capped, this is a big step in the right direction.
In fiscally difficult times, it is great that the government is still investing in the future.
Dr Michael Johnston has held academic positions at Victoria University of Wellington for the past ten years. He holds a PhD in Cognitive Psychology from the University of Melbourne. This article was published HERE
1 comment:
My perspective on this is the lack of initiatives on early learning of preschoolers . A great untapped area that is FREE. More money thrown at education is not the answer Very little if any, of government funds are needed but just a shift in thinking. We have been so entrenched in constructivist and play way learning for far too long. State regulated pre-schools have very few learning activities . Kindergartens are little better. A big feature of NZ Traditional education helped to incentivize the teaching of pre-schoolers (3-5) to read, by having the Whitcombe and Tomb's early readers available for parents to buy. These books were parent friendly, without technical terms or difficult concepts. Many children arrived at school reading already and skipped a year into primer 3.
This is not true now; we have instead the tyranny of professionalism with money, and effort only allocated in PD- teacher instruction- as if they are the only ones capable in teaching infants ( 3-5year olds ) to read.
We have the introduction of the 26 alphabet phonemes (sounds) done in year 0-1 in a certain order contrary to the established alphabet order. Hence parents are not really encouraged to have an alphabet frieze stuck up on their child's bedroom and to practise the sounds and usual order. The better Start Literacy preschool stuff on how to read to a pre-schooler is good but limited .
What should be happening is children of preschool ages should be chanting of the sounds of the letters and their names . Learning to form them with chalk on concrete or blackboard , matching capitals with lower case and listening to educational videos to get the correct pronunciation. Leaning off rhymes and songs , with alliteration, learning to count to 20 and write the numbers and understand the concept of number. Also learn to read and write family names.
The internet is awash with good educational videos - ALL FREE. eg Scratch Garden, Jack Hartmann , Gracie's Corner, Number Rock , Yolanda Sonry's NZ phoneme pronunciation .The University of Florida Literacy site was an extensive range of FREE early reading material to download. The Historical Queensland Readers
and the historical McGuffey Readers are available to download FREE. Structured literacy is not a modern discovery . It has been around for a least a couple of hundred years. It was clever clogs academia who wiped it out .
It is not child abuse to spend some time occupying a pre-schoolers day with structured , formal learning. Rather it is sensible and necessary to improve our shocking illiteracy levels. ALL FREE for goodness sake just a cancelling out of ideological nonsense. Gaynor
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