Over 400 state schools have closed in the last 15 years, and our kids are falling in the world rankings in science, reading and mathematics. What's gone wrong with our education system, and why can't every child have an equal opportunity to succeed in it? Should we worry that Chinese kids seem to be doing better than ours at school? APPLAUSE Teachers will be receiving $8000. Should we give bonuses to good teachers? And what about Tomorrow's Schools? Have they been a success or not? As a former teacher, I'm deeply concerned about what's happened to our education system, so I've been filming in Finland, China and America, and I've talked with some of the world's leading educators. And what I've discovered may challenge your ideas about how we should be teaching our children to prepare them for the future. I'm Bryan Bruce, and this is my report. Captions were made possible with funding from NZ On Air. Copyright Able 2016 How important is your local school to your community? In a couple of days' time, Phillipstown School is gonna be closing after 137 years of teaching the children in this neighbourhood. It's gonna be forced to merge with Woolston, 3km that way. The parents don't want it, teachers don't want it, kids don't want it, and the school board certainly don't want it. That's why they took the Minister of Education to court. The case captured the attention of the nation, because what was at stake was whether elected school boards are really in charge of our schools or not. And the answer was ` they're not. The Education Act allows the Minister to close any school at any time. The trouble is the very same act, created by former Prime Minister David Lange back in 1989, also gave parents the power to run their local school. So after the Christchurch earthquake, when the minister decided it was more cost-effective to amalgamate some of the city's schools, many parents and teachers felt that the partnership between communities and the government, implicit in our Education Act, had been betrayed. Phillipstown Principal Tony Simpson. We really worked hard at taking on what the government expected, and that was self-management and involving the community. So it was agencies; it was organisations; it was a community-owned school. So there's no transparency here? Oh, no. No, no. There's no trust. The` The` The trust with the` with the sector is` has gone. Tony speaks for many on the front line of teaching who feel frustrated at the way that politicians and Treasury officials have tampered with our education system over the last 30 years but have failed to take responsibility for the fact that many of their top-down decisions have gone wrong. So how has it come to this? To understand the mess that the delivery of our public education system is in, we have to go back to 1987, when the fourth Labour government was elected for the second time and Prime Minister David Lange appointed himself the Minister of Education. In anticipation, Treasury had prepared its first ever report on the sector, arguing in line with the government's neo-liberal approach to the economy that education wasn't a right but a commodity. So Lange turned his attention to the way that our schools were being administered through the Department of Education in Wellington. For over 100 years, the centralised system had tried to make all state schools essentially the same by resourcing them equally through a network of regional boards. The aim was to give every child an equal opportunity to receive a first-rate education, no matter where they lived or who their parents were. But that's no longer the case today, because Treasury convinced Lange that the centralised system wasn't cost-effective. And so he set up a task force to investigate the way that schools were being run, and put supermarket boss Brian Picot in charge of it. As we went through our exercise, we found several things that were fundamental. We found that the system was very much an incremental add-on system over the last 70-odd years; it had far too many decision points and overlaps, for instance as between the department's head office and the department's regional offices and the education boards. So what Picot suggested was that we move more of the day-to-day decision-making of teaching to the front line, and also to give parents more involvement in the education of their children. But the way that Picot suggested we might do that was, I think, a colossal mistake. Cos you see, his advice was to simply get rid of the Department of Education altogether and the regional boards, and let every school manage itself through an elected board of trustees. And it laid the foundation for two things that I think are getting in the way of teachers doing their job today. The first is it created an unhealthy competition between schools; and the second thing is, ironically, it created a worse bureaucracy than we had before. Well, I think Tomorrow's Schools ` the idea of having communities, um, closely involved in schools ` is a great idea. But the risk of self-managing schools is that they will manage themselves. (LAUGHS) So what has happened is that in order to stop schools managing themselves into problem areas, there are layers and layers of compliance and regulation around that management. So we don't have the best of self-managing schools, and we don't have the best of a centralist system; we have the worst of both. But instead of facing up to the fact that our self-managing school system is a shambles and consulting with our educators on how to put it right, consecutive governments have instead aggravated the issue by crunching schools together into bigger units. A hunt through the Ministry's website reveals that over 400 schools have been closed under both Labour and National governments over the past 15 years, based largely on the advice of Treasury that bigger schools are more cost-effective than smaller schools. So you might think, 'So what?' If a larger school can deliver the same kind of education as two smaller schools, why wouldn't you put them together? What's the problem? Well, the problem is that the latest research is showing that small schools can be more effective than large schools in certain situations, especially if the children come from lower socio-economic areas. This report says small schools can deliver better results than larger schools and may therefore be a tool to narrow the gap between affluent and poor communities. If that's true, then we really have to take some notice of a tool like that, because take a look at this ` NCEA Level 2 is really the baseline that you need these days to get a job or to go on further with your education. But currently, just 57% of students from decile-one or -two schools leave with NCEA Level 2, while 87% of students from decile-nine and -10 schools leave with NCEA Level 2. So we've got a real problem with what educators call 'equity', or fairness, of which smaller schools might form part of the solution. The idea is that in small schools, the needs of children are more easily recognised and met. If you arrive at Phillipstown hungry, you're fed by community helpers; and if you're small, you feel safe, because in the school's family atmosphere, the bigger kids don't behave like bullies but like older brothers and sisters. In other words, kids learn better because they feel happy. Treasury's advice to the Minister, however, is that the way to lift student achievement is to amalgamate schools in order to save money on property, which could be spent on teacher training. But that assumes we have a teacher quality problem, which we don't ` at least not according to the results of a recent international survey that features on the Minister's own website. And it found our teachers to be amongst the most highly trained and best qualified in the world. And I also find it remarkable that Treasury makes no mention of the studies highlighting the advantages of smaller schools, like those of Professor Craig Howley at Ohio State University, which are quoted in the OECD literature. So I booked a video conference call with him. Thanks for taking my call, Professor Howley. If you were engaged by our Ministry of Education to advise them on the most cost-effective way to improve educational outcomes for kids living in poor areas, what would you tell them? I would tell them to keep their small schools. If a jurisdiction is lucky enough to have small schools, it would be making a tragic mistake to close them in impoverished communities, because they'll do better in smaller schools and worse in larger schools. And we're talking about tested achievement here. What's a large school in America? Any school that's larger than 500. And for high schools, it's a thousand kids or larger. Above that level, schools start to be educationally unproductive, and what happens in those cases ` and this is why I say it's cost-effective ` is that there's a systematic tendency towards bureaucracy and alienation and pushing, um, kids who are likely to be least-attached to the school out of the school and making it an unhappy place, both for teachers and students. So why are we ignoring research that could improve educational outcomes for kids in poor areas? And why do we even have a problem of fairness in our public school system anyway? Porirua bus and train station, Monday morning, 7.30, and a stream of students are heading off to school ` in Wellington, 27km away. Oh, just better education. It's a better education, and, uh, the brotherhood is just a bit stronger over there, eh. Every day of the school year, thousands of kids up and down the country are fleeing their local schools, trying to find a better education somewhere else. And that's not right. Because in a fair public education system, every school should be a good school. So why is this happening? The answer, as with so many things in NZ life over the last 30 years, is the rise of individualism and the politics of choice. By the time Jim Bolger's National government took office in 1990, the neo-liberal ideas of deregulation and 'user pays' had made consumerism the driving force in the NZ economy. In a climate of increasing choice, wealthier parents argued that they should be able to select the state school that they wanted their child to attend, in the same way they could now choose their electricity provider or telco. So National's new education minister, Lockwood Smith, abolished school zoning. Zoning is a very artificial, cumbersome, bureaucratic system that takes choices away from people. The result? Chaos. Schools in low-income areas became underutilised as students fled them, while costs in popular schools blew out as they kept expanding. So in an attempt to preserve parental choice but address the emerging gap between rich and poor schools, Smith divided schools into 10 socio-economic groups, or deciles, and gave more funding to impoverished decile-one schools than wealthier decile-10 schools. But it didn't work. And even after the reintroduction of zoning, competition between schools means that aspirational parents can still find ways to avoid sending their children to the local school, and that's continuing to cause a problem in fairness and resources. So we're now at the point when, um, you know, 80% of secondary schools and about two-thirds of primary schools say that they're directly competing with other schools for students. And what that means is that they don't share. Um, they don't share resources; they don't share knowledge. They're suspicious of each other. And for Maori and Pasifika children, Dr Wylie says that the switch to a competitive, self-governing school system was a disaster. We'd gone into Tomorrow's Schools to improve achievement for Maori and Pasifika students especially. That was the big thing. And they` It just flatlined all through the 1990s. That was a wasted decade, and you look at other school systems that have made progress, and we wasted` we threw away a decade, and we're now struggling to try and make the ground again and get the trust between the schools and the Ministry of Education. But that might be a long time coming, because the lack of trust between the teachers' unions and the Ministry has been an issue ever since David Lange pushed through his radical school reforms without adequate consultation with the profession. And that was followed by National's attempt in the 1990s to put schools in charge of teachers' salaries, which the unions argued would have favoured rich schools over poor ones, and therefore would have betrayed the principle of equal opportunity ` that turned free tertiary education into a commodity by making students pay for their university tuition. It was arguably one of the worst economic decisions we've ever made, as I discovered when I asked Michael Russell, the Cabinet Secretary for Education in the Scottish Parliament, why Scotland still gives university education away for free. Because education's not just an individual good; it's a societal good. It's an investment in society, particularly if you're a small country. What you're investing in is what's gonna happen in the next generation. If you look at one of the statistics about Scottish university education, um, about three-quarters ` perhaps slightly more than three-quarters of` of young people in Scotland who go to university stay in Scotland and work in Scotland. And that means that what you're doing is you're putting the money into their education, and you're getting it out in their contribution to the economy. It's about investing in the future of society, and we've taken a very conscious decision that that's what education is about. And Scotland is just one of a number of countries who see long-term social and economic benefits in giving their young people a free university education ` just as we once did. So at the heart of our education system, it seems to me, we've got two conflicting sets of values. On the one hand, we've got the values we inherited from the beginning of public education ` that it should be free and fair. On the other hand, we've got values that we inherited from the neo-liberal economic revolution ` that education is a commodity and that schools and universities should compete for students and staff and resources. The trouble is you can't achieve equity or fairness through competition, because competition, by definition, means that there'll be winners and losers. And unless we can ensure that every child can enter a winning school, then a competitive system is simply unfair. ALL GREET IN MANDARIN In Shanghai, they do aim to make every school a winner. And by using a highly test-focused instructional system of learning, the students of Shanghai have dominated the OECD's international achievement tests for the last six years by consistently rating number one in reading, science and maths, whereas the results of Kiwi students have steadily fallen ` from seventh best to 13th in reading; from seventh to 18th in science; and 13th to 23rd in maths. And, ironically, one of the things that may have helped Shanghai students improve so much is that they run a centralised system of education, similar to the one that we abandoned 30 years ago, and which encourages cooperation between teachers and schools in a way that our competitive system doesn't. If you wanna become famous in Shanghai as a teacher, you share your lessons on a platform where all other teachers share their lessons. And the more other teachers start using your lessons, the more important you become in the system; the more respect you obtain. It's something that is built from the bottom up on good practice. I do wonder whether in fact one of our problems at the moment is we don't have a way of collaborating as well as we did in the past. And that's exactly my point. The more responsibilities you devolve to the front line, the more you need to invest in capacity, but also the stronger your system around the schools needs to be. UPBEAT MUSIC Half a world away, Finland has also been topping the education tables. And while the Finns have very different ideas about education from the Chinese, they also have a centralised system of school administration as we once had. So today I'm on my way to a school in Espoo, not very far from the capital of Helsinki, to meet head teacher Kari Louhivuori to try and catch a glimpse of what our schools might have been like if we'd never had the Picot Report. Our schools are equal. Kids go to the school in the neighbourhood. We don't have bad and good schools. Parents aren't interested to find out what's a good school or a bad school, because all schools are more or less the same quality. And when I asked Kari how Finland assessed the performance of teachers, I learned that they were doing what we once did but have forgotten. We've got a very light administration. The whole idea is that they're professionals who are working in the school; they know what they're doing. The government trusts the municipalities; the municipalities trust the principals; the principals trust the teachers; and the parents trust the teachers too. Uh, this is the idea. But trust them to do what? What's the best way to teach our children to prepare them for a future that no one can predict? For most of last century, the kind of jobs people did didn't change very much, and so our schools were able to prepare young people for life by teaching them a fairly limited amount of skills. But in today's creative economy, success depends on a whole raft of abilities, and so that's forcing us to ask some very fundamental questions like ` what is the purpose of education in the 21st century today? Let's talk to Andreas Schleicher again. KEYS BEEP To help people to be successful in life ` a life that is very difficult to` to predict. You know, to get a job that hasn't been created, to solve problems that we can't imagine today, to use technologies that haven't been invented. I think that's really what education is about. It has to with interpersonal skills ` the great collaborators. Innovation today is no longer about, you know, you having a great idea and doing it; it's about you being able to connect the dots. That's gonna be the key, because the content, you know, you can look up at Google. The trouble is our test-driven system of education is continuing as if the world hasn't really changed. And because student performance in nationwide tests influences the public perception of what makes a good school, and a good school, in turn, is seen as one that can get its students through nationwide tests, our system is largely geared to producing compliant thinkers rather than creative ones. It's an out-of-date self-fulfilling prophecy that unfortunately still feeds the reputations of many schools ` not just in NZ but around the world. At Democracy Preparatory Charter School in New York, for example, the majority of students come from low-income families, and the school's aim is to get as many of them to college as possible. Because the exams are heavy on content, the school has a test-driven approach to education, where the primary role of the teacher is to instruct the students with the knowledge that they will need to pass those exams. But how do you learn to be a creative and critical thinker in a situation like that? Seth Andrews is the founder of Democracy Prep. In the small amount of time I've spent in the school, I see quite an authoritarian method of teaching. Mm-hm. How is that going to prepare children for critical thinking, uh, for making up their own minds about things? So` That's a great question. We` I get this question a lot. They see a moment in time. They see a snapshot. So in your case, it's exactly a day. And that snapshot is a point in time on an arc, and our goal is to take our scholars from sixth grade to 12th grade, and that snapshot on the arc is part of the journey. It is not the end of the journey. And so when you see a classroom led by a teacher in front doing, you know, worksheets, and learning content and facts, part of the reason that's so necessary today is because they are lacking in so many of the basic skills when they walk in our door. So if you can't read, I can't teach you to be a critical thinker. It's an argument I've heard many times before, going back to my earliest days as a teacher ` that kids have to learn some basics before you encourage creative and critical thinking. But I don't agree, because I don't believe that innovative thinking can be nurtured in an environment where the student learns from day one that the only right answer is the one the teacher wants to hear. And why is it that so many schools continue lecturing whole classrooms of students in an age when we have the technology to allow every child to learn at their own pace? Could it be that the persistence of authoritarian, test-based teaching has more to do with social control than it does with passing on knowledge? I think you're on to something there with that. The connection may be that by teaching students from the earliest grades. Even` They tried to introduce this here in New York City ` high-stakes standardised tests for 4- and 5-year-olds ` and I think what you teach students with that is, 'Hey, kid. We're going to quantify your performance all through your life, so get used to it now. (CLAPS) 'Keep your numbers up, OK? 'Because that's how you're going to be treated when you go to work at McDonald's; 'when you go to work at Walmart; when you go to work anywhere, 'we're gonna have real-time performance data for you, 'and you better learn to live and die by the numbers.' And I think they have the idea that school needs to be revolutionised on the same basis ` we need microdata on student performance. So they are after ways to quantify what's going on in school and be able to sit at a computer screen and watch the numbers and know how education is going. And the idea that the only good education is one that you can measure took a sinister turn in America... Morning! ...when states like Washington DC began paying cash bonuses to schools for improved student results in standardised tests. Aiton Elementary School... APPLAUSE, CHEERING ...saw a 29-point increase in reading and a 42% increase in mathematics! Initially, the scheme was met with enthusiasm. The principals will be receiving $10,000 a piece. Teachers will be receiving $8000 a piece. APPLAUSE, CHEERING But when Atlanta took up the ill-conceived bonus system, 20 teachers from poorer schools ended up in jail for correcting wrong answers on student test papers so they could get their bonuses. The lesson was clear. If you say the student's future is gonna depend on this test, and not only that ` the teacher's future is gonna depend on the test, and then, not only that ` the administrator's future (LAUGHS) is hanging on that test, and` We're not gonna stop there ` the school's future is hanging on that test, well, then, shockingly, (LAUGHS) you're gonna have some people who are gonna decide to figure out a way to cut corners on that test, I mean, if everything is riding on that. And so we've distorted all out of proportion the idea of measurement of teaching and learning. It's no longer a measurement of teaching and learning; it's everything. And it's that pressure to get students through high-stakes tests that some experts say is perpetuating an authoritarian style of teaching that doesn't set children up in the best possible way for the future. Chinese-born American Professor Yong Zhao, for example, says the last thing countries like ours should worry about are PISA tests and world rankings. If I were NZ, I would complete get out of PISA. It forces you to respond to a few test scores. It's ironic, you know, these otherwise smart people listening to three test scores to dictate their children's future. They believe that three scores reflect how hard those teachers worked, how smart their children are and how well they're gonna fare in the future. I can't believe w` why you have these naive people who believe this. Professor Zhao also warns that the authoritarian style of teaching used in Chinese schools won't produce the innovative thinkers that we will need in order to develop a creative economy. The Chinese system is a huge system of test preparation. You've learned all the time to give the authority the answer they desire, and creativity and critical thinking requires you to challenge the authority in a very different way. And while giant economies like China and the United States need lots of compliant workers, Zhao says that small countries like ours need innovative thinkers if we want to grow our economy. Like NZ, for example. You've got four million people. NZ has to be more NZ to win the competition, rather than trying to become more like China. In fact, copying China would be a step backwards for us, to a time when our schools were also designed to produce educated but compliant workers. But in today's global economy, where other countries now make our clothes and robots assemble the cars that we once built ourselves by hand, we're having to find new ways to diversify and expand our economy. That's why we've got a Ministry of Innovation ` because we're gonna have to think smarter if we want to have our economy grow. And that can't happen if we don't produce creative young thinkers from our schools. And if we want that to happen, we're gonna have to cut our teachers a bit of slack and stop telling them that the only thing that matters are the results of tests which have questions with right or wrong answers. Why? Because to do battle in the new creative economy, we need flexible thinkers who can work through complex problems which have more than one solution. Take the multimillion-dollar business of computer gaming, for example. Designing and producing games could be a huge export earner for NZ, if we took a less rigid approach to teaching and testing our children. So, tell me, how well-prepared are students from school, coming to the` to your school? Um, we have a real problem there sometimes. The students get quite upset with us, uh, because we don't tell them the answers to the problems. They have to make their way sometimes, and it becomes really difficult. They're` They're so used to having this sort of, uh, authoritarian, 'This is how you do things,' and what we try to do is give them a problem that they have to solve themselves. And you can't do that with someone telling you, 'It's going to be this way.' You know, it's discovery. And there's a risk involved with that, isn't it? You might be wrong. More than likely, you're gonna be wrong. But being wrong is OK; it's stopping after you're wrong the first time that's the problem. So what do we have to do to make sure that our children and our economy have the best possible future? As the world economy enters the creative age, NZ's prosperity will increasingly rely on our education system producing innovative young thinkers. But that can't happen if success at school depends on simply repeating what you're told. So how should we be preparing our kids for a future that none of us can predict? Well, I've searched the world for an answer, and I think I've found it right here at Manurewa Intermediate. It's a decile-one school in the poorest part of Auckland. But if any school has got the secret of how we can prepare our kids for the future, I think it's this one. One, two, three, four! ALL SING VERY LOUDLY Yes! What they're teaching here isn't just subjects but the joy of learning that will last these students all their lives. And they do that by what's called the 'enquiry method' of learning. It's where students form their own questions about topics, and with the guidance of the teacher, they seek out answers and form their own conclusions. Motivation to want to learn is one of the key aspects of the learning programme. So if I ignite some sort of interest, that makes them more motivated to want to read more; to want to find out more; to want to produce really top quality work. So the process is discovery... Mm. ...rather than, 'You are the fountain of all knowledge and I will tell you.' 'And I will pour all that knowledge into you.' No. Yeah, none of that. So just, um, embarking and ignite their interest so that they want to do something. I mean, I had kids yesterday from another class that I teach that just ` 'Miss, are we gonna be writing today?' They actually wanna get into their work, you know, and get it going. Well, that's the theory. But do students really want to do the hard yards themselves? Or would they take the easy way out if it was offered? Why does carbon dioxide put out fire? Do you know? (LAUGHS) That's, like, what we're trying to figure out. Oh, it's what you're trying to figure out. So you don't want me to tell you the answer? Nah. Oh. Brilliant ` kids taking responsibility for their own learning. This is surely the way to produce creative young thinkers. But to build a school culture where enquiry and learning thrives needs inspirational teachers like Principal Iain Taylor to make it happen. If you are 11, 12 or 13 years of age and you are reading at a... CHILDREN JOIN IN: ...5-, 6-, 7-, 8-, 9-, 10-year-old reading age, it's not forever! Tell the person next to you what you're doing about it! CHILDREN CHATTER So what are you trying to do at this school, Iain? What's the purpose of education here? It's to give kids the best deal possible within an environment that allows them to think, to be creative, to make mistakes, to have a try at something. But they also have to take responsibility for their actions as well. So whilst we're not authoritarian, we are actually very organised. So there are systems and structures in place that allow our kids to be informal and flexible and all those sorts of things. It's the same student-centred discovery approach to learning that I found at the heart of the Finnish education system. More than 20 years ago, Finland dropped its test-based approach to learning for one that reflects real life ` where you try things and learn from your mistakes. Any tests that are given are largely diagnostic and aimed at detecting individual differences, in order to teach each child more effectively. Now, of course, NZ primary teachers do that too. But they're also required to report to the Ministry of Education through a national standards process that promotes the similarities between children rather than their differences. Broadly, the process is that teachers are free to choose which of many kinds of tests available on the ministry's website they'll give to their students. Based on the results and their own observations, the teacher then makes a judgement as to whether a child is at, above or below the national standard in reading, writing and maths. Teachers are then expected to check a sample of their judgements with their colleagues before the school sends their assessments off to the Ministry of Education, who collate the information from around the country and publish it. But while this data may look impressive, the fact is that different teachers at different schools are assessing children using different tests and different methods on different days, which means that all this time-consuming data collection is of very dubious value. Now, while some might see that as an argument for standardised testing, and while it's true that there does come a day when students eventually have to come up against each other in external exams, Finland has discovered that by removing the tyranny of competitive tests, and by trusting teachers to do progressive individual assessments instead, has produced more creative thinkers and better overall results. I think how we think about this in Finland is that there needs to be a kind of fearless environment in schools and in society so that people can take risks, because without trying things and taking risks, then there will be no creativity. And if there's no creativity, there's no innovation. I think that Finnish teachers have been fairly good in transforming this culture that we used to have that was very much based on being able to give the right answer at the right time in the right place and then you were, uh, rewarded. But not any more. Now it's more about the` teachers are expecting that the children try things out. Creativity and innovation are extremely important qualities right now. Finland's decision to replace its test-based education system with one that gives teachers more freedom to develop the curiosity of their students has helped transform their country's economy from one that was dependent on primary industries, such as forestry, into one that now also trades in knowledge and technology. So if we also want to diversify our economy, we need to face up to the fact that while teaching to conformity delivers test results that are easy to measure and compare, it also stifles creative thinking ` the very ability that we need to foster in our children if we want to grow our economy in the future. It will also require our school administrators to recognise that in the modern workplace, complex problems are increasingly being solved by teams of people rather than individuals, and therefore greater weight has to be given to the teaching of social skills, such as cooperation and oral communication, which will mean developing new ways of assessing such abilities in our children. OK. The teachers' cars got a bit muddy today when they came to school. For example, I set up a playground experiment in which teams of children would carry buckets of water from a bin in order to wash their teachers' cars. Ready, set, go! CHILDREN SHOUT, CHEER What I didn't tell them was that the buckets had holes in the bottom of them and that what they would be marked on was how well they worked together to solve the problem. The yellow team didn't communicate with each other and settled for individual solutions to the leaky-bucket problem, as did the blue team. However, members of the red team decided to work on a solution together, as did the green team. Now, while it's easy to see that some kids are solving the problem better than others, there's no easy or objective way to measure their individual abilities. However, if we trusted teachers to collaborate as judges, as they do in determining national standards, then it would be possible to come up with a grade for each child on things like their ability to work with others to solve a problem. So we could transform our education system to produce more cooperative and creative thinkers if we took a more flexible approach to assessing our children. Hi to my mum! And if we did decide to do that, then the advice from Finland, the most successful education system in Europe, would be to allow our children to play until the age of 7 before starting formal schooling. We think that play is a kind of fundamental tool for children and` and people to realise that they have imagination and, uh, kind of cultivate and develop that, uh, increasingly important area of our lives. So from Finland the message is clear ` if we want to have creative young people coming out at the end of the system, then we're gonna have to spend a lot more resources at the beginning of the process, developing the talents of the very young. And there's mounting evidence that that has to happen way before school starts. Arguably, the greatest factor governing the success of children at school is what happens at home. While it's true that many children from poor homes arrive at school substantially behind their cognitive development, it doesn't have to be this way. For 20 years, the HIPPY programme has been teaching low-income parents how to prepare their children for school. And while basic numeracy and reading skills are obviously important, founder Dame Lesley Max says that simply encouraging parents to talk with their preschool children can greatly improve their cognitive skills. A child in a professional home hears something around 11 million words in a year. A child in a welfare home hears something like three million words in a year. Now, when that is added up and the child enters school, the child who's had the less verbally rich background enters at a disadvantage. Now, HIPPY helps to rectify that disadvantage. It's impossible to overstate the importance the early years have for later life. 80% of our brain growth, for example, happens before we're 3 years old. So should we be teaching our kids to read, write and do maths much earlier? Our Chief Scientist, Sir Peter Gluckman, says, 'Don't rush it.' The most important thing is to encourage children to interact with other people well, to understand how to respond to` to instruction, to complete tasks; how to interact and understand other people's feelings ` to have empathy, and so forth; exploration. These sorts of skills are so important to success in life. There's a lot of evidence that it's those skills that determine whether people can be resilient to the stresses of teenage years and later life. They're more likely to complete high school. They're more likely to get a job; more likely to have successful social relationships in later life, stable relationships; uh, earn more money. Uh, there's` Less likely to go to jail, to get into trouble with the police. There's quite a lot of evidence around this. But despite all of this research, we're still spending more money towards the end of our education system than at the beginning. And to make matters worse, our kindergartens have been faced with substantial cuts to their budgets in recent years ` a situation made even more difficult by the relaxation of preschool teacher qualifications that allows private early education providers to fill up 20% of their positions with unqualified staff. Parents, of course, are the first teachers, and these 16 months of paid parental leave that Swedish families enjoy to look after their newborn children ` compared to the 18 weeks available to Kiwi parents ` is a measure of how much we undervalue the role that parents play in the foundation years of a person's life. Certainly, much of the success children have at school depends a great deal on the attitudes that parents have to the value of education. Doug and Angela Rawiri live in South Auckland. They have five children and money's tight, but they don't short-change their kids when it comes to spending time on their education. Right from day one, your school is, um, their pathway to their life, innit? We're only a` a guide for them. What they get inspirations` They get it from their teachers. So from day one, you want the school to, um, equip your children with whatever they need to do to carry on. So it's actually three ways ` your parent, your teacher and the child. We're very open with our teachers, and` and they go to the extremes in helping us. PEOPLE SING IN MAORI No one knows what the future holds for our children, but it seems to me that fostering the love of learning needs to be at the heart of our education system, and we need to find NZ solutions on how to do that. Yes, it's good to be able to read and write your history, but how much more relevant to your life is it if you can sing it or be moved to tears by it? ALL SING: # Takahia atu ra... # And you don't have to sit in straight rows in a classroom to learn discipline or follow instructions. You can learn those things just as well, if not better, by performing in a kapa haka group. GROUP SING IN COUNTERPOINT So, while there are many good things happening in NZ schools, my overall assessment is that they're happening in spite of the way that we administer public education, not because of it. ALL HARMONISE, SONG ENDS One of the underlying principles of a good public education system is that it should be fair. Well, ours isn't, and so I think we need to face up to the fact that when we introduced the concept of self-managing schools almost 30 years ago, we ushered in a period of unhealthy competition, and that's created a huge gap between the educational outcomes of children in rich and poor areas. So I think we need to develop a more cooperative system in which teachers feel trusted to look after our children and to bring out the best in them, and that students feel that they're safe to develop their talents and abilities without constantly being tested. Now, that's going to be difficult to achieve, but if we don't start a national conversation today about how we can bring these things about, then we're not going to have a vibrant and creative economy tomorrow. Captions by Catherine de Chalain. Edited by Glenna Casalme. www.able.co.nz Captions were made possible with funding from NZ On Air. Copyright Able 2016