Peachey Allan: Estimates Debate — In Committee 
Peachey Allan: Estimates Debate — In Committee 
[Volume:640;Page:10412] 
ALLAN PEACHEY (National—Tamaki) 
: 
 I take the few moments allotted to me to speak in the estimates debate to refer to what I have described in other writings as the silent catastrophe in our schooling system. I express some pleasure—some satisfaction—that as a result of the work of the Education and Science Committee and the debate in this House some recognition is now finally coming that for too many of our children the collapse in the teaching of numeracy and literacy is having a negative effect on their lives and a negative effect on the prosperity and growth of this country. 
Nobody can argue with the statistics. We all know—and there is no point in disputing it—that something like 30 percent of our children are not learning to read write or calculate at a level sufficiently high enough for them to function fully in the adult community. That has consequences for our economy. It also has consequences for the strength of our democratic system. We cannot ignore that. 
After 60 years of compulsory universal education and schooling in New Zealand we have reached a point where a third of our children for a variety of reasons are not learning the basics that they need to function in our community. At least we no longer brush that under the carpet and at long last we are seeing some recognition of the need to challenge that problem. 
I caution the Government not to fall into the trap that educationalists have been falling into for years and that is to say: “Look at how good the top end is. Look at how good our best students do.” Nobody knows better than I how good our best schools are how good our best schoolteachers are and how good our best students are. However that is not a solution and not an answer for those children who are not experiencing success. It is vital that in this debate we move beyond cheap point-scoring excuses and that sort of thing and actually make some sort of commitment in this House that it is in the national interest of this country that we earnestly and urgently address the failure in learning of 30 percent of our children. We should be capable of doing that. 
If I could offer the Minister a little bit of advice I would suggest that everywhere where the centralised answer lies in bureaucracy and where an approach of appointing more officials has been used very little progress has been made. The most difficult change to bring about in a schooling system is in the relationship between individual teachers and children in the classroom. We will not solve this problem for our children until we find a way of addressing that issue. One of the first things we have to do is to develop greater respect for the work of the schoolteacher. It is far too easy far too often to expect the school to be a panacea for all of the community’s worries. Then when that panacea does not develop we make the school a scapegoat. 
This issue of literacy and numeracy will be solved only in the quality of the relationships that are established in classrooms between schoolteachers and children. It is the same with the truancy issue. Children begin to truant from school because they become disengaged from learning. It is teachers who engage children in learning. I regret to say it but too many of our children are imprisoned in schools where the expectations are not high enough where the excuses are rampant and where the ideology is more important than whether children are learning. We have to get to a point where school teaching in New Zealand once again attracts its share of the top third of graduates coming through our universities. There are principals out there and people involved in teacher training and teacher recruitment who will tell us that that is not happening.