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Early Childhood Education Disaster: "I Told You So!"

"Donna Awatere Huata correctly chides Trevor Mallard for ‘the record 2210 primary and early childhood school teachers [who have] left New Zealand in the past twelve months to February this year," agrees Libertarianz Leader Peter Cresswell, pointing the finger at Mallard’s forced retraining of early childhood teachers as a major culprit.

Cresswell, his party’s spokesman to deregulate early childhood education, says: "This is an entirely predicable disaster, one that that this Minister is almost solely responsible for; and one I predicted a year ago."

Writing in The Free Radical magazine last year, Cresswell noted: "Challenged at an Auckland public meeting to explain what will happen to a small school whose owner & head teacher must leave to undergo three years of forced re-training – after twenty years of successful teaching -- Dullard admitted, ‘I don’t know.’ I do, & so too did that teacher - so probably do the parents of children at her school, & so do the many others being herded into retraining: It will be a disaster. Many early childhood teachers will simply leave the profession, or will leave the country for saner pastures abroad."

Continuing, he said: "I predict in two years time that the number of early childhood centres will have markedly diminished, & those remaining will be struggling to find teachers with significant experience."

One year on from those words the forced retraining chickens are beginning to roost. I challenge the Minister to pull back from forced retraining, before he really lays an egg.

ENDS

The article ‘Athens v Sparta’ from which the above quote comes can be found at: www.freeradical.co.nz/content/42/42editorial.shtml

For more information contact:

Peter Cresswell LIBERTARIANZ SPOKESMAN FOR DEREGULATION OF EARLY CHILDHOOD EDUCATION (025) 861 927, organon@ihug.co.nz

www.libertarianz.org.nz

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