There is no Poverty in New Zealand...

The state of poverty in New Zealand today is horrendous. So many children are going without food, without adequate shelter, without clothing, without shoes, without education. The biggest problem that New Zealand faces today, is the widening gap between classes which are roaring back into society. 

The upper and middle classes of this country have no idea of the amount of poverty that exists in New Zealand. That people survive with four children on a single income of less than $20,000 a year doesn’t feature in their ideas of life. 

I work in one of the poorest areas of New Zealand and I see children constantly come to school who have no lunch, no breakfast, no shoes, no jacket. Who have been up late the night before, because their parents have had a sunday night drinking or smoking session. That have had to baby-sit their little brothers or sisters all weekend because their parents have been away. That have moved house in the middle of the night because they couldn't afford rent. That had to move in to their auntie or uncles house and are sharing a bed with 5 other kids. That have a family of 8 living in a 3 bedroom house. That have had to sleep on the couch or the floor for the last month because there is no more room. That have moved schools five times by the time they are six, because their parents go wherever they can get a house and some work. 

We were talking about this issue with some of my friends lately, and one of them said something profound.

“I don’t know how to fix poverty, but I reckon education is a good place to start.”

How do you teach someone who comes to school with no social skills, with no food, with no clothes, with no idea of what a book is, to sit down and read and write, to achieve national standards?

How do you get a child to be literate who comes from an illiterate household. A household where there is 0 support. A household where school is seen as the enemy.

I was at a conference recently and there was someone talking there from Brainwave. He said that research has shown that the ages of zero to three are the most fundamental years for a child's development. He said that you can predict (not quite 100%) whether a child is going to go to university or not by the time they are three years old. This has nothing to do with DNA. It is completely about risk factors that the baby is exposed to before they are three years old. 

Some people have said that we need to have warrant of fitnessnes to see if people are going to be a good parent. Or people need to have parent licenses to become a parent. These will never work, we know they will never work. A much better strategy would be to put money into those zero to three years so that we can support families who have children, to get rid of those risk factors that create children who are ‘at risk’.

New Zealand has much less money going into younger children than other OECD countries. In fact, New Zealand puts more money into children the older they get. If you put a picture of a child down at each age, with a dollar sign above their heads, you would see that the older they get, the higher the money allotted to that group. It should be the other way round. The Early Years are so fundamental to all children's well-being that we should be spending far more money on the younger children than the older ones. 

One of my friend’s friends had two babies. One before the plunket budget cuts and one after. With her first child, she received weekly visits from nurses, she received books, she received a whole lot of support material to help her with her child. With her second, she received monthly visits by the plunket nurse and no material. 

Is this how New Zealand aims to get rid of poverty? By cutting support to low income families who have children. A lot of people having children now days are children themselves. They don’t know how to look after their own. How do they find out how to do it if not from specialists. Just because someone has a child doesn’t make them an automatic parent genius. By the time these children reach the school system it is too late! One of my friends said that a parent came to him with an illiterate child at 5. The parents told him that the reason the child was illiterate was because someone had told them not to do any alphabet work, “leave it for the teachers, because you might teach it wrong.” It doesn’t matter how the child gets to know the letter ‘A’, as long as they know it, it’s fine. How can teachers get their students up to “standard” if they come into school knowing nothing. That child is going to be labelled a “failure” by the state simply because he cannot read or write as well as the norm. And what is the norm? 

What is normal development for a child? Some children develop late, their brains all mature in different ways. Who is the government to say that students should all be reading at level 12 by the time they are 8? Who is the government to say that reading, writing and maths are the most important things.

Actually in this day and age, writing is not as important as it used to be. Everything can be done on a computer now, you can even talk to your computer using Dragon and it will write it all for you. Reading is not as important either. There is actually almost nothing that you need to read to survive in today’s world. There is either some sort of computing device who will read it out to you, or some person who’s job it is to help you read and fill it in.

National standards misses out on the important things that make students fantastic. Simply the progress students are making. It totally focuses on the level they are at. 

Jimmy starts “well below” national standards at 5 because his parents are in poverty and he came to school illiterate. In his first year at school he makes great progress, he makes 5 years of progress in one year and by the time he is 6, he’s at a 5 year old level. National standards still shows “well below” because Jimmy is still “well below” where a 6 year old should be, but it doesn’t show the amazing progress Jimmy has made. He has completed 5 years of work in one year, that’s amazing and should be celebrated. Jimmy is definitely not a failure, he is a miracle worker. 

The important stuff that Jimmy is going to need to know when he leaves school are things like how to manage himself, how to argue and stand up for himself. How to manage his money to stay out of the poverty cycle. How to shop and get food, how to reflect on what he has done and change what he will do in the future. How to make his own choices in life. The New Zealand curriculum supports these through key competencies which are a fantastic addition, but teachers now are so focused on ‘achieving the grade’ of national standards that these have pretty much gone out the window. If teachers don't ‘get the grade’ then they are seen as failures, and if the government gets it’s way, will get their money cut. 

Teachers have been ‘doing’ national standards for years, it’s simply in a different format. The curriculum is an average for students, and we measure all students against it. National Standards is a fancy way of labeling children as failures, and it has been proven not to work, it has been proven not to help achievement in the slightest, in fact it is detrimental to it.