"Please Explain Stupid Training" Says Awatere Huata

Making paper planes appears to be the best training teachers can get to come to grips with the new National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA) system, ACT Education Spokeswoman Donna Awatere Huata said today.

She was commenting following an acknowledgement from the Minister of Education in Parliament today that, he shared her concerns about the type of methods recently tried out at a training session for teachers.

Mrs Huata had asked Education Minister Trevor Mallard in a Parliamentary question, to explain why a professional development handbook for the NCEA contained an exercise about making paper planes which took up a quarter of the total two days training available.

“It is a pretty sad state of affairs if the best training Mr Mallard’s Ministry can give to help teachers get to grips with 5000 untested unit standards, is to make them stand in one spot and see if they can make a paper plane fly in a straight line,” Mrs Huata said.

She said she was pleased the Minister agreed with her concerns but said if the situation was not so sad it could be laughable.

“Teachers are increasingly divided on NCEA and the Concerned Teachers movement highlighted their views by releasing guinea pigs at the recent PPTA conference, because they considered NCEA such a risky experiment.

“Employers want something better to measure school leavers ability by and every available academic research suggests the system will not work,” Mrs Huata said.

“If anyone needed confirmation that this Government is driving the dumbing down of our education system, this is it,” Mrs Huata said.

ENDS

For more information visit ACT online at http://www.act.org.nz or contact the ACT Parliamentary Office at act@parliament.govt.nz.

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