It is going to be interesting to see how hard the Nats push their policy of shifting from a pretty strict zoning system based on a right to enrol if in zone to giving flexibilty to schools to pick and choose students.
Being in the Auckland Grammar zone increases the value of a house by between $100 and $150k, it will be interesting to see how Nikki Kaye balances her pretty extreme free market views with the writing off of property values.
Big + for Jacinda I think.
“..we will see how Nikki Kaye balances her pretty extreme free market views with the writing off of property values.”
There isn’t a National MP with “extreme free market views”, let alone Nikki Kaye.
bad call trev. as a former education minister you should know that the auckland central electorate isn’t in the auckland grammar zone, with the exception of a small part of the electorate west of Queen Street. Parents in western bays and grey lynn will celebrate being able to send their kids to auckland grammar.
Bad call Mel. You don’t read posts properly or you don’t understand them.
anne, property prices won’t be affected in auckland central because auckland central isn’t in the grammar zone. Western bay residents have been crying out for access to decent state secondary schools for years, it will be a big plus for nikki if kids from auckland central can attend those schools. One of the negative effects of the zoning policy is it has artificially pushed house prices up within the zone. that’s not free market at all.
Enrolments schemes that don’t include geographical zones are nuts. Other factors could well be considerations, but the notion of the neighbourhood school being where your kids go and being reliable is fundamental to any understanding of a community. This notion that NZ schools are less accountable to parents just doesn’t hold up to any scrutiny and yet it’s the basis for the “choice” argument. By comparison with NSW, NZ parents have more and better information about their school’s performance plus direct influence through the Board.
What’s the fascination with AGS, they have a worse fallout record at the end of the first year at Uni than almost any other school. Why ?, ask one of the kids and the fairly common answer is “We were badly prepared, the teachers did all the work for us, at varsity we had to do it ourselves and it was a struggle!”
the fascination Adrian is that it is a very popular school and parents want to send their kids there, like EGGS. Trev doesn’t want parents from Grey Lynn or the Western Bays to be able to send their kids to the better schools, he wants them to have to go to the low quality state schools in Auckland Central.
NSW parents less informed about their schools performance? Maybe before the Aus govt implemented the Myschool website. I just HATE having access to information, hurts my ordinary New Zealander head.
Adrian, do you have a source for you allegations?, or is it just an unfounded rant?
Yeah it will be interesting to see how someone from the Waikato, who stood in that electorate in the last election will be able to get up to speed over Auckland Central issues.
On that note, why isnt Jacinda Arden committing herself to win Waikato in 2011? Why is Auckland central so important? Wouldnt it make sense for Labour to also target Hamilton East and have Jacinda Arden who is actually from nearby which is just as marginal as Auckland Central or is it fair to say that Labour has already written off all the provincial seats?
rjs Jacinda was a list MP so hasn’t represented any Hamilton seats. Its common for party’s to require them to stand for an electorate somewhere. It doesnt mean they are forever tied to that seat .
Anne Tolley for instance was a list MP based in Napier yet eventually won a seat covering Gisborne and Whakatane.
Jack, yes myschool is new and yes it provides information on a narrow range of standard assessments, however there’s nothing like the ERO or the ERO reports in NSW. Nor are public school principals accountable to local boards, nor do they hire staff and even decide on the number/mix of staff (plus as I said up-thread NSW schools have geographical zones). My point remains that NZ schools are directly and transparently accountable for their performance. Too often this is overlooked in what’s become a oddly abstracted debate. So much so that the PM today said national standards will ensure we stop failing kids (or words to that effect) which ignores the real and absolute improvements achieved in NZ schools in the last decade as measured by PISA etc (sure there’s always room for more improvement, but to pretend that the internationally comparative data doesn’t exisit is ridiculous).
@Paul Williams – despite all your (and other people’s) words I still can’t understand why you have such an issue with schools stating clearly, in a standard manner, how kids are doing against a national standard for their age.
Without this yardstick a parent has no idea of how good/bad their child’s performance level is compared to what can be expected of their peers.
George, that’s not what Australian myschools data shows; it shows how the school performs in terms of aggregate NAPLAN scoroes, not the individual.
There’s plenty of other data you can use to assess your child’s performance.
Auckland Grammar complain that they are forced to take too many students due to zoning. If they start taking kids from further afield, won’t that mean they will start rejecting kids within their zone? If that happens, that will be the end of school zones.
Personally, I’d prefer my kids going to Western Springs College, their results are excellent (as are all the schools in central Auckland)
TopCat, I remember Grammar complaining bitterly about zoning when i was there in the late 90s. They were dead keen on taking students from all over Auckland, not just Epsom and the like.
@adrian – couldn’t agree more. Our sons attended AGS in the early 1980′s and even then they commented on the extreme and constant pressure some of the classmates’ parents put their boys under, come exam time and the absolute despair when some of them failed and were relegated to a lower class, some dropping out altogether. We chose to encourage our lads in every possible way while they were there and let them choose their own career options without undue pressure. They went on to Auckland Uni and both came out the other end with double degrees through hard work. They also commented on the 1st year drop out rate of some of their AGS compatriots. Sweetd – it’s only an anecdotal rant but it’s what I clearly recall one of them often mentioning – that non AGS students adapted more quickly to the varsity regime and it took him some time to. He stuck to it and ended up with a MA (first class honours).
Jilly Bee, yes, I have often heard the same, but would like to see some numbers. Also, as a grammar old boy myself, I take the comment more as a case of tall poppy’s from other lesser schools. After all, if the school is so bad, why are people cheating and lying about their residence to get their sons in passed the zone checking rules?
Why can’t successful schools (as grammar is) be franchised? That is, the successful school model take over a failing school? That would release the pressure and allow more to share under the successful school’s model.
[...] post was rather stupid, to be blunt. It says/said: It is going to be interesting to see how hard the Nats push their policy of shifting from a pretty [...]
Sweetd : “Why can’t successful schools (as grammar is) be franchised? That is, the successful school model take over a failing school?”
Because they don’t fit into the paradigm of what the teachers unions want to provide?
Perish the thought that parents be allowed to have a real choice of the style of education they get for their kids.
40% of rush hour traffic in Akld is education-based. ie parents driving their kids to and from school. I would have thought that the traffic would be reason enough to continue with zoning…. Imagine how much worse the traffic would be if parents had to drive past the school of closest proximity, cris-crossing the city from home to school to work, back to school and home again just because the school of closest proximity won’t take their children. And any faint possibility that students might walk has just disappeared because school will now be too far from home. There are many great arguments for school zoning (this is just one of them), and very few good ones against.
Stuart, what a silly idea. Taking your great argument further, why not zone everything then; shopping, sports, entertainment, food. If it is not in you immediate eare, then sorry, you can’t have it, you must make do with the state sponsored version in your area if it exists.
Blaming trafffic on popular and in demand schools is a straw man indeed.
stuart, did you live near grammar when you went there?
Stuart – in your statement you demonstrate everything that is wrong with Labour when you say ” I would have thought that the traffic would be reason enough to continue with zoning…. Imagine how much worse the traffic would be if parents had to drive past the school of closest proximity”
How about a good reason for choice of education (ie no / limited school zoning) being about parents (not the government) being able to choose the most suitable school for their children?
Ball Jack Trevor
Monty says: “How about a good reason for choice of education (ie no / limited school zoning) being about parents (not the government) being able to choose the most suitable school for their children?”
… because parents would choose the ‘wrong’ sort of school.
The well off can either pay for private education, or move next to whatever school they want. Zoning only truly limits the choice of the poor. In the end it’s the bright kids from the poor homes that suffer.
This is a fact free post from Mr Mallard. He in fact was the Education Minister in 2000 who tightened zoning implemented by National in 1998. He seems to have forgotten that. Hansard makes for interesting reading on the matter too.
Auckland Grammar School is not in Auckland Central, it is in Epsom.
Nikki Kaye is a pinko and hardly free market, oh that she were.
Mr Nash, clearly you don’t take your kids to school, or even walk with them, otherwise you would know the reason why traffic is so high at school start and school end.
I’ll tell you why parents drive their kids to school, because the school won’t let them ride bikes, or scooters or even skateboard to school, even though they aren’t responsible for them until they go through the school gate. Just go to any school during the day and find for yourself the empty bike racks.
If you ask parents why they take kids in cars, they say the traffic is too horrendous for kids to be riding to school. But if they rode then traffic would drop.
The school says a kid isn’t experienced enough to ride a bike to school. Except they can’t get experience with traffic unless they ride in it.
They are all circular arguments resulting in parents driving their kids because of no other option.
As a society and as parents we have made our kids fearful and timid. As parent we fret that some pedo will grab them despite the statistics of that happening being so low you are more likely to cancer from a microwave.
So the kids ride in style to school in a car.
Whaleoil, don’t TS, no school in auckland would tell kids not to ride their bike to school. There arn’t enough bike racks most of the time… Why don’t you try sticking to the facts…
n0exit, all the schools I have had contact with (Primary) have an age normally years 5-6 whereby you can ride to school or take scooters. So please get out there and find out. Walking school buses (A great concept) are hard work to maintain parent help. The current school I am associated with has only 2 such buses catering for 10-20 students each for a school pop of 800+. With the demise of school pools and sport associated with primary schools there is then an added pressure for after school activities and the travel that is associated with them. Whilst these are not earth shattering issues they are real to many of us, and many in Wellington cannot relate to this an everyday family life and what that entails.
N0exit I’m not, Mellons Bay Primary is just one such school, despite long discussions about that. Now who is TS?
Mellons Bay doesn’t need any bike racks because they don’t allow kids to ride to school. My daughter wanted to, was physically able to, had learned the road code and the school said no. We live less than 1.5 km from the school.
School zoning is to make life easier for administrators.
Shame about the Maori/Pacific Island role at Auckland Grammar dropping from around 16% before zoning to around 3.5% (see: The Listener: School wars, by Amie Richardson – Feb 2006
unintended consequences – ignored to make life easy for central administration.
Herodotus, I am saying that there are plenty of kids that bike to school and that schools don’t tell them not to. You seem to agree intially but then veer off course… Not quite clear on what you are saying. I’m with you on the afterschool activities but that is not what whaleoil is saying. He belives that high schools are telling kids not to ride their bikes. This is BS…… I know because I go to (one of?) the top high school in auckland.
Schools limit who can and cannot, our local school years 5-6 are required to get written permision by the school to be able to bike to school, those younger are not allowed under any circumstance to ride or scooter to school. So they do by the rules tell children NOT to ride/scotter to school below year 5 i.e. 10 year olds and under.
Zoning unfortunately has to be applied for such things as town planning reasons. BUT this does protect those less attractive schools whom if there was no zoning we would get a very real poll on what schools parents value. So we would not need league tables the poll/vote or calcutta would be the real litimus test.
It will be a big “+” for Jacinda if she doesn’t go on the hustings and betray her utter ignorance of the electorate she aspires to represent (you obviously didn’t waste any time checking the marginal overlap between the AGS zone and the Auckland Central electorate),
balance deleted personal abuse and language Warning Trevor
Still, nice to see Labour is so concerned about the property values of “the few” in Remmers and Parnell.
Craig
Don’t forget Epsom.
Well perhaps parts of Epsom, in the listener article there was also this great quote;