“May you live in interesting times” -
apparently, an ancient Chinese curse. Well, I’m all for a good curse here and
there, but surely we can come up with something a bit more blood-curdling like,
‘May your funding be forever stopped’, or ‘May a Moratorium on all PTE’s
darken your future’ or perhaps ‘We’ll send your kids home from school’.
Employers are co-customers of the education system. Are they being
short-changed?
We
are certainly ‘living in interesting times’. Like many of my colleagues
reading this journal, I spend so much of my time working on my business that I
don’t get to know deep inside information about many of the things that are
‘hot’ subjects in the news. Therefore I find myself often in a state of mild
perplexity at the latest antics of those with powerful influence in our
education system. Perhaps some of those influencers might feel uncomfortable
enough (while reading this) to write letters to mine Editor and explain, thus we
will all be educated. For instance, I’ve never been a Secondary School Teacher
– or any other kind of school teacher, and from what I hear of the lack of
discipline and many reports of actual assault on teachers, I don’t think I’d
want to be. I mean, if you join the Police or take a job as a nightclub bouncer,
you accept the potential risk, you know the risk before you take the job on, and
you’re trained to minimise the risk of actual harm to your person. But a
Teacher? So in that at least, they have my admiration and sympathy. What I
don’t understand is the resistance of many to the prospect of the new NCEA.
Perhaps a Teacher might want to write in and explain – I came through the old
School Certificate system many years ago, and I’m one of those people who
don’t cope well with exams. For instance, in the 5th Form I could
speak French conversationally pretty well, if I do say so myself. My Teacher
expected a good result. So did I. My School Cert result? 17%. Fail. Had I been
assessed on actual Competency rather than simply what I could remember under
pressure, I know I would have passed moderately well. I wonder if people have
forgotten that it wasn’t so long ago that, as the exam results started to come
in, if too many people looked like passing School Certificate, ‘they’
(whoever ‘they’ were) would artificially ‘raise’ the pass-mark – a
process called ‘scaling’ – to ensure that the proper number actually
failed, and in so doing totally ruined the employment chances of thousands of
young people. How anybody can defend that is beyond me. If the NCEA means that
our young learners are judged by what they can do as much as by what they can
remember, then I am in full support of it, and I just wish people would stop
using the NCEA as a means of ‘hydraulic-ing’ their pay and conditions, and
remember who the customers are. No, teachers are not paid enough – the good
ones, at any rate – but should the future of our young people be adversely
effected as a tool for raising pay? Watching TV news the other day, the item on
the demise of Best Training, a successful Private Training Enterprise (PTE), due
to cessation of Government funding left me feeling particularly depressed about
where this country seems to be headed in terms of education. To be frank, it’s
why I have always held back from the temptation to involve our company in any
training that involved Government (or anyone else’s) funding. He who can turn
the tap on, can turn it off at will, and there is simply no way you can run an
enterprise with any kind of certainty when the money supply can be turned off in
response to political whims. I’ll stay with a commercial market that, while
tough sometimes, usually acts with a degree of intelligence and responsibility.
Best Training, an enterprise involved in providing much-needed education to
people who otherwise would be denied it, and by all accounts doing a bloody good
job of it too, has been trashed in an eye-blink because of political
interference. Somehow I can’t imagine that happening to a Polytech or a
University – why is that? I guess PTE’s are a soft target, and in the
competition for Government funds, the big pigs shoulder out the little ones at
trough-time. My sympathies go not only to the students who won’t now get the
education they might have otherwise, nor to the trainers who have to find a job
somewhere else, but also to the gutsy entrepreneurs who came up with the Vision,
had the determination to see it through, and took the big business risk –
something those in control of Government funds clearly don’t currently
understand and will never aspire to. Long live the Status Quo, God, please,
don’t let anything change – we’re happy in our mediocrity. The interesting
thing is that, when NZQA was set up, there was clear recognition and acceptance
that, in terms of workplace training, employers are the customers and do
actually know what they want in terms of competencies in the workforce, and were
included as major – if not equal – partners in the decision-making process.
Why is it that the same realisation cannot be applied to Secondary schooling? I
think it is high time that those decision-makers in school education stopped
seeing themselves as the only decision-maker in how our young people are
educated, and that those in control of the Government purse give more credit to
those in the Private sector who just might actually be capable of producing a
better output. I have long believed that those charged with educating our young
should be performance-rated in terms of how many of their students actually
demonstrate competency, in exactly the same way that any other service provider
is judged – quality of output. If you don’t produce top quality, you don’t
get paid top money, and if you continue (after opportunity to improve) to not
produce quality, you are encouraged to seek gainful employment elsewhere.
Perhaps I’m too
commercial. It’s not that simple, is it. Or is it?
Steve Punter ANZIM,
Dip Bus (PMER), FHRINZ
Staff Training Associates Ltd, Auckland, New Zealand.
© Steve Punter 2002 All rights reserved by the author.