Rose Patterson looks at whether it's a bad thing when busloads of kids drive past their local school, bypassing it for a ‘better’ school

By Rose Patterson*

A bus drives past School A. It is brimming with kids bypassing their local school for a better one down the road. This is a typical story in New Zealand’s education system. Competition lifts the game for many, but without a mechanism to share good practice, the School As of this country are too often left behind.

To deal with this problem, Prime Minister John Key announced a major policy in January to foster collaboration within this competitive system. Starting in 2015, the $359 million Investing in Educational Success (IES) policy will come into play. Schools will join up with each other as Communities of Schools with a career path for teachers in each community as a mechanism to share good practice. It is a massive system change.

Yet there is a certain naivety to the whole idea.There is no one in Wellington who can click their fingers and expect schools to join hands, sing kumbaya, and share the secrets of their success with one another. Especially when many of these schools within communities compete for student numbers. But that doesn’t mean policymakers can’t adjust the settings to foster this much-needed collaboration.

Collaboration and competition can be mutually enhancing, but only if the right ingredients are in place. This was the finding of the New Zealand Initiative’s research into Learning and Change Networks (LCN), an existing school collaboration strategy, which will be published this week in No School is an Island: Fostering Collaboration in a Competitive System.

LCN is far smaller than the IES, involving about 10% of schools and $7 million funding, and it still in its infancy, having started in 2012. But LCN packs a punch, and IES policymakers should take notice of this little gem.
At the heart of the Initiative’s report is this: Collaboration within a competitive system is possible, but the IES policy settings need to be adjusted to allow the time and help for schools to build trust, relationships, and a common purpose. These ingredients are essential if policymakers expect schools to learn from each other and really make the IES policy a worthwhile investment.

Competition – it’s a good thing

Let’s explore the concept of competition in schooling. The bus analogy above is an example of parents exercising choice, and of schools acting competitively.

The resource that schools are competing for is the dollar sign above each student’s head, since schools are funded partly on a per-student basis.

While putting it in these terms makes it all sound like schools are only after money, there’s nothing cynical about it. Schools are constantly crying out for more funding, it is natural for a school to want to keep money flowing in the door to resource their school.

It also sounds awfully cut-throat, but in practice it is not. The Initiative recently interviewed a primary school principal for No School is an Island, who was far from the caricature of a cut-throat kind of a person. On the contrary, she was warm, caring, thoughtful, and incredibly dedicated.Yet in economic terms, she is a competitive actor. She explained that when she arrived 15 years ago enrolments were low and parents were bypassing the school.

“It was hard, but we just kept working at what’s best for the kids, what’s going to drive the best outcomes,” she said.

While she probably wouldn’t consider “doing the best for the kids” to be competitive, the competitor schools had at that time been providing a better education, at least as judged by parents, and this competition had put pressure on her school to lift the standard of education they were providing.

That is the effect of choice and competition. It is little wonder this kind of economic terminology rings alarm bells in the minds of educators and parents. But this parental choice provides the edge of accountability that puts pressure on schools to provide and promote the kind of education parents want for their children.

The down side of competition

But there is a down side to competition in schools. What happens to the local school that is watching their school roll fall? In an ideal world, this school would act in the same way our principal did, marshalling resources and skills to lift standards.

But this was a decile 8 school that likely had a skilled board of trustees. The kinds of parents of the kids left behind in schools with dwindling roles are less likely to have skills and resources to exercise good choices. The children who the system should be providing the most educational opportunities for are the ones left behind.

While there is no measure of the quality of teachers in different schools, for example, it is not much of a stretch to suggest that schools with poor reputations might have trouble attracting good teachers as well as students.Of course there are excellent and dedicated teachers working in schools that need them, but research by Marie Cameron shows that the most promising teachers go to schools where they feel most supported. Arguably, these are the more desirable schools all round.

Some schools, like the one mentioned earlier, manage to do pull themselves up. Others struggle, and there is no systematic mechanism to learn from the good work that other schools are doing. School B is unlikely to share their secrets to success with School A when they are competing for resources.

New Zealand Council for Education Research (NZCER) Chief Researcher Cathy Wylie has studied New Zealand’s self-managing school system for more than 25 years now. The main tenet of her book Vital Connections is that there is a lack of infrastructure to share good practice throughout the system.

In a truly competitive market, there are mergers, acquisitions and mimicry, which enables the businesses providing the best value to grow. That way, good practice is spread around, and consumers generally win in the end.
But the public schooling system in New Zealand doesn’t work like this and many students lose out. Logistically, it is difficult to justify building extra classrooms in School B when there is spare capacity at school A. So School A continues as it was, but without the skills to lift educational standards.

A new model – collaboration within a competitive system

The IES policy represents a major change aimed at getting schools to share practice with one another. It is once-in-a-generation opportunity to improve the whole system. It recognises that there is excellence within the system, and opens up connections to allow that excellent work to spread.

IES represents a large investment of $359 million over four years and $155 million each subsequent year. But if the government truly wants to invest in educational success, they must show returns on that investment by getting the policy settings right.

A good step towards delivering a return on this investment would be to learn from the LCN model. If it incorporates the strategies that have enabled these schools to work well together, the IES would go a long way to delivering an education system that provides the benefits of both competition and collaboration.

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*Rose Patterson is a research fellow at the New Zealand Initiative. The NZ Initiative contributes a weekly column for interest.co.nz.