The National Party wants all schools to reopen immediately, and says paying schools up to $400 per student and regularly testing children would help them make up for lost class time.
Photo: RNZ / Dom Thomas
The party this morning released its 'Back on Track' plan to help school students catch up on their curriculum.
It comes ahead of the government announcing a decision today on whether students under Year 11 in alert level 3 will return to classrooms on Monday. Children in Auckland have been learning from home for 13 weeks.
National's plan calls for all schools to reopen immediately with an urgent rollout of vaccination in schools to all over-12s, along with regular rapid antigen testing.
It would also:
- Offer between $100 and $400 per student for schools to invest in catch-up initiatives. This would be allocated based on days of class missed and weighted towards low-decile schools, with one-off costs estimated at $145m.
- Freeze major changes to the curriculum and NCEA for two years.
- Require schools to submit attendance data and publish attendance rates for each term.
- Set a target for each student to meet 90 percent attendance, with schools that have 20 percent of students falling short of this target two terms in a row to develop a truancy plan.
- Require any school where more than half of students fall short of the target two terms in a row to hire a specialist truancy advisor.
- Require at least an hour of maths and an hour of literacy for all Year 1 to Year 10 students each day.
- Require every school to benchmark each Year 3-10 student's reading, writing and maths ability using the Ministry of Education's e-asTTle assessment tool by the end of March 2022. Progress to be tested every school term and reported to the Ministry and parents.
- Require schools to work with parents to develop a learning recovery plan for each student a year or more behind expectations.
- Instruct the Ministry of Education to work with schools to identify and publish the lockdown innovations that could be retained to improve the way children learn in Kiwi classrooms.
- Integrate the best of online learning, and expand children's access to online courses.
Education spokesperson Paul Goldsmith said the government had no plan to address the damage done to children's learning.
"Online learning can never replicate the full benefits of education that come from attending school in person," he said.
"If they don't go back before the end of the year it'll be five months that kids have had out of the classroom and when you're an eight-year-old that's a lifetime.
"We should get them back as soon as we possibly can."
He said New Zealand could not wait until children were vaccinated.
"Look, there's no country in the world where kids are vaccinated across the board now, but kids are going to school ... it could be eight months before vaccination's available [to children aged 5-11], we need to be back at school and being educated."
"We need to clear the air so schools can focus on catching up. And the strong signal I've had from many principals is that there is so much going on in terms of curriculum review - some of it is absolutely important, I'm not saying you drop absolutely everything - but the bulk of it is something that we can put to side for a year or two to concentrate on getting ourselves back on track."
He said the catch-up funding for an Auckland school with 1000 students would be about $400,000, which could pay for 10,000 hours of tutoring, 10 part-time teacher aides, five counsellors or 8000 extra hours of teaching time.
Schools themselves would identify what would best make a difference to help their students catch up, he said.
Party leader Judith Collins said the risk of children not going back to school now outweighed the risk of reopening schools.
"Even without lockdowns, two-in-five children do not attend school regularly and lockdowns increase the risk of long-term disengagement," she said.
The e-asTTle is a bilingual assessment tool. Tests are devised by teachers.
