4 June 2015

Education Minister challenged to come clean on charters

The Green Party is challenging the Education Minister to come clean on what’s known about the success, or not, of the five charter schools that have been open for more than a year, as annual reports due this week fail to tell the full story.

Radio New Zealand has reported today that the schools were required to published their annual reports by this week, and so far only three of the five schools have reported.

“The reports are either not available or, those that are, don’t paint the full story about how their pupils are doing,” Green Party Education spokesperson Catherine Delahunty said.

“The National/Act Government promised from the outset that charters would be more accountable to the public than regular state schools, but a year and a half later, all we really know is that they’re costing the public millions of dollars.

“Vanguard Military school boasts an up to 100 percent success rate in NCEA, but doesn’t say how many of its students actually participated in the qualification this year.

“A big risk of charter schools has always been that they will only encourage kids who are likely to do well to participate in order to make their results look good, or that will encourage hard to teach students to leave.

“I challenge the Education Minister to say how many of those students who were enrolled at charter schools at the beginning of 2014, left school that year with a qualification, and why schools like Vanguard and South Auckland Middle School are excluding so many kids for behavioural reasons.

“I also challenge the Education Minister to confirm whether there is a single student with high special needs, enrolled in any of the charter schools. A document obtained by the Green Party late last year showed that, at that stage, not one charter school had any high needs pupils enrolled despite these pupils supposedly being priority learners for enrolment.

“The Green Party encourages schools to use innovative techniques to help students reach their potential, but this does not require millions of dollars in public education funding being funnelled into privately run experiments, that are nowhere near as accountable to the public as regular state schools,” Ms Delahunty said.

ends

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