Labour’s Education Strategy: The best way to solve a problem is to hide the data.

At a systemic level education is in crisis in New Zealand. Often this has been sensed but the Ministry/Government work so hard to keep data/rankings/effects of policy from the public that often people can only speak in anecdotes.

Chris Hipkins says that the decline in attendance began in 2015. It did a wee bit – however the decline has been so massive under Labour he is simply deflecting. Under-national there was a relatively quickly solvable trajectory. He has flown the plane into a stalled-dive.

From Term 2 2019 to Term 1 2022 – decile 1 full attendance declined from 37% to 22%. All other deciles declined also.

When questioned in the House on this Jan Tinetti stated that Term 1 data was far less relevant than Term 2 data and that Term 2 data will show the effect of their wonderful policies.

It took less that 11 weeks from the end of Term 1 to get anonymised attendance data for NZ schools through Education Counts.

Because the data is so important and number of people, including myself, have been asking for the Term 2 attendance data. There has been a flat refusal to release it with the latest answers saying “November” – approx. 19 weeks after the end of Term 2. There can be no real expectation for it taking at least 8 weeks longer. Unacceptable from the most transparent government ever.

Sometimes they pre-load this hiding of policy effects. With the new Equity Index (EQI) numbers to determine funding for schools – there is no requirement for schools to inform the Ministry and/or taxpayer on what they will spend extra money on. There is also no requirement to show improvement across and range of measures. Hipkins says this change to EQI numbers is bi-partisan because National started the change away from deciles. That is true but I would pretty much guarantee they would have had goals, measures and incentives – and a much greater opportunity for improvement for students. By not having public measures schools will now be known by a number that indicates the proportion on students at risk in their population. More stark than deciles were.

Labour has become the anti-education party.