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Speaker 1: Education experts are calling on the government to step up

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Speaker 1: its game when it comes to improving Maori education rates.

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Speaker 1: So we had the NCEEA figures out last week and

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Speaker 1: Mildi students lagged around twenty percent behind European kids or

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Speaker 1: Pakiha kids or non Maori kids in last week's NCEA

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Speaker 1: results for all of the reading, writing, and maths. So

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Speaker 1: education consultant Allen Poole is with me right now.

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Speaker 2: Hello Allen, Hi Andrew, how are you very good?

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Speaker 1: How big is that disparity in these recent NCEA results

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Speaker 1: between Maori and everybody else.

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Speaker 2: It's huge and it's been long term huge. But one

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Speaker 2: of I guess to me, there are two imperatives about

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Speaker 2: improving things, and they are imperatives. One is that the

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Speaker 2: portion of New Zealand that is Mari or Pacifica who

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Speaker 2: are also struggling, is now increasing rapidly and years time

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Speaker 2: that kind of political ethnic portion of our population will

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Speaker 2: be thirty three percent. And then the second one is

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Speaker 2: to me, it's a moral imperative and linked to the

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Speaker 2: Treaty of Whiteitangi. If every ethnicity has full status as citizens,

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Speaker 2: then we should be fully providing and expertly providing and

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Speaker 2: we're not.

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Speaker 1: But what are the reasons for the huge gap, Because

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Speaker 1: it's not just because you've got brown skin, you know,

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Speaker 1: there are other reasons around that that contribute to it,

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Speaker 1: which predominantly affect people with brown skin.

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Speaker 2: Well, yeah, people can point to causality, and I think

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Speaker 2: one causality is that we are not very good at

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Speaker 2: presence in New Zealand at parenting are zeros to five.

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Speaker 2: There are loads of examples of children from a range

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Speaker 2: of situations arriving at school at five years old and

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Speaker 2: being significantly behind, and that was quite well reported on

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Speaker 2: last year. But we do very little about parenting, and

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Speaker 2: these children who are coming to school at five years

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Speaker 2: old and are a long way behind, we can show

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Speaker 2: that as a whole they don't catch up, and then

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Speaker 2: as we can sort of continue through schooling that those

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Speaker 2: differences get exacerbated. But I also think that we live

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Speaker 2: well and truly in the past by seeing people with

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Speaker 2: brown skin with the old kind of attitudes that they

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Speaker 2: are tactile, that they are looking forward to a role

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Speaker 2: as a laborer and all this sort of thing, and

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Speaker 2: we're missing out on developing huge amounts of ability that

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Speaker 2: are needed for productivity. They're needed for our good society.

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Speaker 1: So how does the government fix that, Because it's pretty

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Speaker 1: clear that they don't like basing any funding decisions or

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Speaker 1: any decisions at all on race.

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Speaker 2: That is clear. And I hear people like Don Brash saying, look, wise,

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Speaker 2: equality a dirty word because he's looking at some form

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Speaker 2: of equality under law. But I don't think he's looking

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Speaker 2: any deeper than that to see just how disadvantaged through

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Speaker 2: life because of our education situation and a link to

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Speaker 2: parenting and previous poverty and previous education things, there is

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Speaker 2: no equality for Marii as a whole in our society.

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Speaker 2: They are a long way behind it in many ways.

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Speaker 2: So I mean the government might look at it as

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Speaker 2: an ethnicity thing, but they have obligations, whether that's under

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Speaker 2: the treaty or whether it's just a human obligations United

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Speaker 2: Nations rights of the child, and it's a huge problem.

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Speaker 2: They have to fix it.

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Speaker 1: Obviously, if we improve education right across the board, it

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Speaker 1: will mean Milord kids get a better education. Or do

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Speaker 1: we need to do something to target this portion of

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Speaker 1: the population specifically, And again something that I think you'll

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Speaker 1: find the government is not into.

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Speaker 2: Look, I think we need to start from scratch to

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Speaker 2: some extent, with every child born, regardless of ethnicity, how

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Speaker 2: do we provide an outstanding first five years for them?

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Speaker 2: And that's important. We do nothing I've advocated before for

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Speaker 2: a crown entity for parenting that's non interventional, it's informational based.

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Speaker 2: We need to change the attitudes of our schools by

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Speaker 2: incremental goal setting. A lot of the schools who are

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Speaker 2: straggling down the bottom, if you like, of our achievement

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Speaker 2: tables are predominantly Maori schools and we just let them

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Speaker 2: go on year after year after year and don't change anything.

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Speaker 2: And look, I mean it's probably a bit of a

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Speaker 2: bugbear for me because I don't think they do a

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Speaker 2: great job. But prior to the election, Act to National

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Speaker 2: said they would reprioritize and repurpose the Ministry of Education.

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Speaker 2: They're still go over fury two hundred employees and what

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Speaker 2: do they do? And it's increased our education profile and

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Speaker 2: achievements have gone down.

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Speaker 1: Allen, I thank you so much for all your comments today.

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Speaker 1: It is Alan Poole who is an education consultant former

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Speaker 1: ahead of maunt Hobson Middle School. Last article I saw

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Speaker 1: from Allen was in praise of the Grammar Way of

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Speaker 1: doing things. For more from Hither Duplessye Alan Drive, Listen

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