The Government has cut valuable education programmes like night classes and the enviro schools programme because it says it wants to use those funds for improving literacy and numeracy.
Imagine how surprised Literacy Waikato was when that same Government cut its funding last month.
When I took Labour leader Phil Goff to meet with the Hamilton-based literacy service recently, they were still perplexed about how the Government rhetoric could be so misleading.
With 25 part-time paid tutors and 35 volunteer tutors all trained to high professional standards, they offer highly-effective literacy classes for adults in our community. They regularly see lives turned around and opportunities opened up through the work they do.
And yet, the Government has cut the funding to its parent organisation, Literacy Aotearoa, by $600,000. The impact on Literacy Waikato could be in the order of $100,000 less funding at a time when the Government is supposed to be prioritising literacy.
I believe that night classes involving everything from cooking through to parenting classes do contribute to better literacy and numeracy.
Phil Goff and I also visited Hamilton East Primary School to see their fantastic environmental programme. It certainly taught literacy and numeracy skills in a hands-on practical way. The children showed an enthusiasm for their projects that would put most maths lessons to shame. And yet, the Government has pulled the funding from the Hamilton-based unit that supports schools across New Zealand to develop and sustain these excellent programmes.
It just doesn’t add up.
Is the Government just using the “literacy and numeracy” line as an excuse to make severe and short-sighted cuts across our precious education system? If the funding from those cuts is supposed to be going into literacy, then why is that funding being cut too?
And why do private schools deserve an increase in funding at the same time as the vast majority of ordinary New Zealanders have their education programmes cut?
Just don’t get me started on how short-sighted it is for the Government to force hundreds of people in Hamilton onto the unemployment benefit instead of giving them the opportunity to further their education at the University of Waikato or Wintec by capping the student numbers.
In just 10 months, this Government has our education system in a state of turmoil.
Help Sue. some of us old blind people have trouble reading text this small. That mainly meand me.
Thanks John – now it is really big. Hope the message is clear.
John,
If you hold down the button on your keyboard, ‘CTRL’ then press the button with + on it the text size should increase for you.
It was a shame that Labour did diddly-squat about the 600% increase to the student levy at Canterbury University. It would possibly have been a PR coup if handled correctly as the increase was due to National’s cuts.
The current govt (as did the previous govt), has done nothing to discourage the empire building that has gone on within the tertiary education namely polytech system.
As an organisation the polytechs have grown to provide for needs, one must ask weather the need is now student,education, industry, and community based or is a need by administrators to build bigger and in their eyes better monuments.
One possible answer may lie in some form of central control for these organizations as against large parts of the effort being directed to creating courses to gain as much of the money TEC doles out?
Perhaps a case of the cart pulling the horse.
It would make sense to see some of the efforts from TEC directing adult literacy and numeracy, rather than teaching people who can’t read or write to weave flax or carve stone.
Follow the money. I’d put odds on it being taken out of community projects and diverted to private, for profit, projects with all the dead weight loss that that will entail.
Someone pointed out to me that the cuts for adult education exactly matched the amount given to private schools. Anyone know more detail here?
Welcome to Red Alert Susie,
It is even worse than you were told – the private schools were given more taxpayer funding than was “saved” from the ACE cuts.
Private Schools got $35m extra and just $13m was saved with the ACE cuts.
National Standards and the Anne Tolley Interview…
The Ministry has released a summary of feedback received from consultation. Anne Tolley also appeared on Q+A and spoke about them last Sunday week.
On the response page, under the Design of Standards heading the following made me laugh at first
The mat…
Here’s a key bit:
PAUL: One other little bit of information, of intelligence, which has come to the ear. Are teachers’ advisors, who are teachers who go around teaching teachers and advising teachers, are they going to be scrapped at the end of this year if they are not advisors on numeracy and literacy?
ANNE: I’m not aware of that… teacher advisors? What we’re doing next year is focusing on the support, school support systems on numeracy and literacy, and the professional development to support the national standards.
http://business.scoop.co.nz/2009/09/21/qa-interview-education-minister-anne-tolley/
How can she not be aware of the cuts to school advisors??