Stephen Jennings’s recent speech to a New Zealand Initiative audience (NBR, July 22) was a wake-up call to Kiwis. It had discordant and harmonious notes.
The harmonious aspect identified emerging opportunities for New Zealanders in fast-growing Africa, particularly in agriculture. Outward-looking links into Africa need to be built along the way.
The discordant theme was that things are tracking to get even harder for unskilled Kiws. Competition from the likes of China and India have already made it a bad time to be unskilled. It will get a lot worse. Competition from African countries for unskilled (and increasingly skilled) work is coming. The world does not owe us a living.
Too many unskilled
His next point was that New Zealand has far too many young people with low standards of literacy and numeracy, and few work skills. He suggested if the electorate does not support action out of compassion and a sense of moral duty, it should think about doing so to preserve civility and the public peace. Ouch.
Of course, he is right. Gallingly, it could be done. We don’t have to reinvent the wheel. We could merely take the time to learn from others. Ours is not the only way to run an education system. It is beyond doubt that it is not the best way.
Singapore provides a telling example. A 2007 McKinsey study of teachers rated Singapore’s education system as one of the best in the world. It achieves among the best outcomes in the world for its students according to the OECD’s PISA rankings.
On World Bank statistics its government spends appreciably less per secondary school pupil than the OECD average.
Meanwhile, New Zealand pupils score only marginally better than the OECD average, apparently for a similar amount per pupil.
So how does Singapore do it and what can we learn? An OECD analysis pinpoints an enormous focus on selecting, training and developing teachers and principals. The system is proactive in attracting top achievers into teaching. It does not sit back and hope that some will apply. The OECD reports that teaching “has developed into a competitive and well-regarded occupation. It is also now considered to be an honour to be a teacher in Singapore.” Who would say that in New Zealand?
Singapore also focuses on testing and tracking individual students. Parents see education as a key to desirable jobs and social mobility. Indeed. Martine Udahemuka’s recent report for the NZ Initiative on failing schools pointed to the importance of relating teacher performance measures to pupil attributes and, ultimately, pupil outcomes.
Singapore’s system puts a lot of pressure on students to achieve. Of course, that has a downside but so does a system that condones failure when much is at stake.
What needs to change?
Mr Jennings called for a total overhaul with the goal of getting New Zealand into the top-five performers. The link between teachers’ pay, promotion and performance needs to be much stronger. Much more emphasis should be put on recruiting, training and retaining high-quality, motivated teachers.
He also singled out New Zealand’s dismal rate of growth in output per worker. It does indeed signal a society undergoing long decline. At least since the advent of MMP, many political parties have promised the electorate grandiose rates of economic growth from policies that are incapable of delivering it.
To take a prominent example, Helen Clark’s prime economic goal, when prime minister, was to get New Zealand back into the top half of the OECD for income per capita. But the goal was absurd in the context of her government’s policies.
In any event, productivity growth was much lower during her period as prime minister than during the period of what she was fond of calling “the failed policies of the past.”
More happily, this government has returned to the Lange-Douglas and Bolger-Richardson practice of not promising unachievable targets for economic growth. Less happily, it is not doing much to lift productivity growth.
To be fair, MMP makes it hard. A Peter Dunne alone can block badly needed reform of the Resource Management Act, which is more responsible for low productivity growth, including the Auckland housing crisis, than any other single act.
Still, many things could be done to get better outcomes from existing resources. The NZ Initiative is working on options for giving local communities greater control of their own affairs.
Again it is sensible to look overseas for instructive lessons. In a report published this week, Jason Krupp has done just that.
His case studies compare degrees of local autonomy in Manchester (UK), Switzerland, the Netherlands and Montréal.
The differences are intriguing. Manchester has a population of 2.8 million. Belying its stagnant high unemployment past, it is now a successful and instructive inner-city revitalisation story. Its local authority is in the process of getting near-complete control of the running of the city’s policing and fire services, criminal justice system and much else – along with control of £6 billion of central government health and social programmes.
Useful comparisons
Switzerland is about the size of Canterbury, with a population of eight million. It also has 26 cantons (regional government) and 2294 communes. Federal government does defence, foreign policy and trade. Political power resides in the individual, not in central or local government.
Two critical things stand out. Both empower citizens, as distinct from the bureaucrats or politicians. One is competition between cantons. The Swiss are mobile, they readily vote with their feet. Another is direct voting (referendum). It is considered a public duty to vote responsibility. Amen to that.
The Netherlands is a third impressive and thought-provoking case. In contrast, Montréal provides lessons in what to avoid; particularly forced, ill-justified amalgamation.
The individual is now largely disempowered here. District plans have become extremely legalistic and processes time-consuming and convoluted. The value judgments of professional insiders readily dominate.
All this waste of time and money is part of New Zealand’s low productivity story. So Mr Jennings is right. Much needs to be done to better compete in a world that does not owe us a living. That applies to education as well as local government.