Election 2017 - Party Policies - Education - Primary Education
27th May 17, 9:50am
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Primary Education
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Not yet available on their website.
- Ensure that all state schools are fully funded to a level where high quality educational delivery is not dependant on the collection of fees, private donations, fundraising, nor private investment.
- Increase the operations grant to reflect the real cost to schools of educating children.
- Provide a tagged fund per school (outside the operations grant) for cocurricular, LEOTC (Learning Experiences Outside the Classroom) and local extracurricular activities, to ensure that a learner's ability to pay for these does not exclude or restrict any pupils from these educational opportunities and activities.
- Widen the teaching of practical and social life skills in primary and secondary schools.
- Change the staffing formula to enable an incremental reduction in class sizes over time.
- Read more here.
- Review the funding system for guidance counsellors in schools, including investigating the possibility of ring-fencing that funding so that it can only be used to fund guidance counsellors, and consider how additional counselling services can be offered to primary and intermediate school students.
- Ensure that all early childhood and primary school teachers are provided with an opportunity to undertake lessons in Te Reo Maori.
- Make it much easier for schools and parents to request a learning needs assessment for any child that may need additional learning support.
- Ensure that schools are fully supported in dealing with behavioural issues by increasing the number of social workers available to all levels of the education sector, ensuring all schools have an effective anti-bullying programme and providing external multi-agency support for schools in cases of criminal activity, such as assault.
- Re-establish the Gifted Advisory Board to identify and share evidence based effective practices. The board will be supported by a dedicated team within the Ministry of Education and will also be allocated a budget to commission research.
- Read more here.
- Reduce class sizes in primary schools.
- Provide all children with free afterschool care and holiday programmes.
- Improve the rates of literacy and numeracy among Māori and Pacific children so they are comparable with non-Māori.
- Make te reo Māori, Māori history and culture core curriculum subjects in all schools up to year 10.
- Establish a $1 million annual fund to support Ngā Manu Kōrero, a primary school reo rua spelling bee annual competition, an annual secondary national quiz competition as well as a Māori toastmasters’ competition.
- Read more here.
- Invest $126 million over four years to improve student achievement in maths at primary school.
- Providing 1200 fully funded places a year for teachers wanting to undertake university-level papers targeted at teaching maths to primary students.
- Provide intensive support in the classroom to students who need it, in 1000 schools per year that have identified maths as a particular issue.
- Ensure all children have the opportunity to learn a second language at primary school, if they choose to; and invest $160 million over four years to provide schools and Communities of Learning with more expert language teachers, language specialists and online resources.
- $45 million to revamp National Standards so children, parents and teachers can track their progress throughout the year in key learning areas.
- Read more here, here and here.
- Replace National Standards at Years 1 to 8, with children’s progress and achievement being assessed against level bands within the New Zealand Curriculum.
- Strengthen School Entry tools and practices to better identify the specific support each student needs to attain their academic best.
- Rework the PACT tool to ensure it is an educational tool for the sector and not a monitoring tool for the government.
- Establish an early intervention staffing component for identified new entrants at risk in literacy and numeracy within initial priority being U1 to U3 schools.
- Re-establish funding support alongside national professional development for the roll-out of the Te Kotahitanga initiative for all schools.
- Read more here.
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