How different is school today?

Where did you go to school? Was it Australia, or did you come from elsewhere?

In the beginning of 1960s I started Melville Primary School in Ohaupo Road, Hamilton, New Zealand. I remember a bottle of milk (stopped on 10 February 1967, but started again in 2013 by Fonterra), a polio vaccine, sitting on the floor in front of my first teacher Mrs Cockerel (why have I always called her Mrs Parrot??), my first male teacher, Mr Burns. I walked to and from school, at first with mum and later on my own. It was only 1km, but at age 5 it felt like more than that. I learned much of what I remember that this school taught. There’s a page on their website about when the school first started on 4 August 1924!

Back in the 60s no primary school children wore uniforms, and I enjoyed my own clothes. We didn’t just “dress up”, we dressed down – to play in old clothes. That has now changed. Melville is green and red.

I went on to an Intermediate – the Melville Intermediate in Mount View Road – which was Form 1 and Form 2 for children upgraded from Primary School but before they attended High School. We had a base class, but we shuffled around throughout our courses – and many different children chose different subjects. I did cooking, sewing, art, music, science, and of course maths and English. We wore a uniform there, similar colour to the high school uniform but we all appreciated it. It’s changed a lot these days but still seems to be green and red.

The High School in Collins Road used to be a Teachers College but that moved out to Hillcrest where the University of Waikato is, in 1965. (According to a website from the university, “In 1991 it became the first teachers’ college in New Zealand to amalgamate with a university; it was the first to offer a four-year Bachelor of Education, a Doctor of Education and distant education programmes.”)

The High School had been at the intermediate location but moved up to the old teacher’s college, and the intermediate was set up. By the time we moved up to High School we’d had enough of uniform – some people dressed it down. It’s a little different these days, but still green and red.

In 1975, three years after I left high school, New Zealand started ‘Kia ora te reo’, the Maori Language Week. Maori became an official language in 1987, and these days there are many Maori-language schools – very different from Australians not learning their Indigenous languages. (Even though English in Australia is not ‘official’, there are between 290-363Aboriginal/Indigenous languages which don’t encourage the white population to accept any of them as ‘official’.)

New Zealand had a Labour government throughout the 1980s, and Labour decided that education needed reforming. In 1987 there was the Picot task force with Brian Picot, a businessman, Peter Ramsay, an associate professor of education at the University of Waikato, Margaret Rosemergy, a senior lecturer at the Wellington College of Education, Whetumarama Wereta, a social researcher at the Department of Maori Affairs and Colin Wise, another businessman, who released their report Administering for Excellence: Effective Administration in Education in May 1988. According to Wiki, “The government accepted many of the recommendations in their response Tomorrow's Schools, which became the basis for educational reform in New Zealand starting in 1989.”

The McGuiness Institute did a report in December 2016 which looked at the “History of education in New Zealand: Timeline of significant events of the history in education in New Zealand, 1867-2014”. It’s a pdf, but very interesting reading. Have a look through the 1960s and 1980s. In 1989 the school leaving age was raised to 16, and in 1990 Kura Kaupapa Māori was formalised in education legislation.

The National Party took over government, under Jenny Shipley, in 1990 until 1999, and changed much of the Picot task force. Helen Clark took over for Labour from 1999 until 2008. John Key, National Party, won in 2008 and again tried to re-change much of the Picot education. Under the Education Minister Anne Tolley, and the following Hekia Parata, they called for many changes to the legislation which was highly unpopular. Jacinda Ardern (Labour) has recently won (2017). She graduated from Waikato University in Hamilton in 2001 (alma mater) – read about her, she’s very interesting! In August 2017 Ardern advised that “Labour will increase the amount students can get in student allowances and living cost loans by $50 a week, while accelerating our plan to make three years of post-secondary education free”. Well done, Ardern!

Where is Australia up to? Do you know?