Alwyn Poole: education consultant on the growing calls to improve achievement rates for Māori students

Experts are urging the Government to step up and help boost achievement rates among Māori students.

The latest NCEA data shows Māori students lagged 20 percent behind their Pakeha counterparts in reading, writing and maths.

Education consultant Alwyn Poole says this is a huge disparity - and it's been a long-term concern. 

"There are loads of examples of children from a range of situations arriving at school at 5 years old and being significantly behind - and it's been well reported on."

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Education experts are calling on the government to step up
its game when it comes to improving Maori education rates.
So we had the NCEEA figures out last week and
Mildi students lagged around twenty percent behind European kids or
Pakiha kids or non Maori kids in last week's NCEA
results for all of the reading, writing, and maths. So

(00:24):
education consultant Allen Poole is with me right now.

Speaker 2 (00:28):
Hello Allen, Hi Andrew, how are you very good?

Speaker 1 (00:31):
How big is that disparity in these recent NCEA results
between Maori and everybody else.

Speaker 2 (00:37):
It's huge and it's been long term huge. But one
of I guess to me, there are two imperatives about
improving things, and they are imperatives. One is that the
portion of New Zealand that is Mari or Pacifica who
are also struggling, is now increasing rapidly and years time

(01:01):
that kind of political ethnic portion of our population will
be thirty three percent. And then the second one is
to me, it's a moral imperative and linked to the
Treaty of Whiteitangi. If every ethnicity has full status as citizens,
then we should be fully providing and expertly providing and

(01:24):
we're not.

Speaker 1 (01:25):
But what are the reasons for the huge gap, Because
it's not just because you've got brown skin, you know,
there are other reasons around that that contribute to it,
which predominantly affect people with brown skin.

Speaker 2 (01:35):
Well, yeah, people can point to causality, and I think
one causality is that we are not very good at
presence in New Zealand at parenting are zeros to five.
There are loads of examples of children from a range

(01:55):
of situations arriving at school at five years old and
being significantly behind, and that was quite well reported on
last year. But we do very little about parenting, and
these children who are coming to school at five years
old and are a long way behind, we can show
that as a whole they don't catch up, and then

(02:15):
as we can sort of continue through schooling that those
differences get exacerbated. But I also think that we live
well and truly in the past by seeing people with
brown skin with the old kind of attitudes that they
are tactile, that they are looking forward to a role
as a laborer and all this sort of thing, and
we're missing out on developing huge amounts of ability that

(02:39):
are needed for productivity. They're needed for our good society.

Speaker 1 (02:42):
So how does the government fix that, Because it's pretty
clear that they don't like basing any funding decisions or
any decisions at all on race.

Speaker 2 (02:51):
That is clear. And I hear people like Don Brash saying, look, wise,
equality a dirty word because he's looking at some form
of equality under law. But I don't think he's looking
any deeper than that to see just how disadvantaged through
life because of our education situation and a link to

(03:14):
parenting and previous poverty and previous education things, there is
no equality for Marii as a whole in our society.
They are a long way behind it in many ways.
So I mean the government might look at it as
an ethnicity thing, but they have obligations, whether that's under

(03:34):
the treaty or whether it's just a human obligations United
Nations rights of the child, and it's a huge problem.
They have to fix it.

Speaker 1 (03:43):
Obviously, if we improve education right across the board, it
will mean Milord kids get a better education. Or do
we need to do something to target this portion of
the population specifically, And again something that I think you'll
find the government is not into.

Speaker 2 (03:59):
Look, I think we need to start from scratch to
some extent, with every child born, regardless of ethnicity, how
do we provide an outstanding first five years for them?
And that's important. We do nothing I've advocated before for

(04:19):
a crown entity for parenting that's non interventional, it's informational based.
We need to change the attitudes of our schools by
incremental goal setting. A lot of the schools who are
straggling down the bottom, if you like, of our achievement
tables are predominantly Maori schools and we just let them
go on year after year after year and don't change anything.

(04:41):
And look, I mean it's probably a bit of a
bugbear for me because I don't think they do a
great job. But prior to the election, Act to National
said they would reprioritize and repurpose the Ministry of Education.
They're still go over fury two hundred employees and what
do they do? And it's increased our education profile and

(05:04):
achievements have gone down.

Speaker 1 (05:06):
Allen, I thank you so much for all your comments today.
It is Alan Poole who is an education consultant former
ahead of maunt Hobson Middle School. Last article I saw
from Allen was in praise of the Grammar Way of
doing things. For more from Hither Duplessye Alan Drive, Listen
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