1989: Tomorrow’s Schools

April 24, 2023

By AHNZ

Today in New Zealand history, 24 April, 1989, the first Board of Trustee elections were held in accord with the new Tomorrow’s Schools policy of the re-elected Labour 4.0 Ministry. Our primary schools had long since been captured by The State and their grip tightened more over time. Yet, here was a government letting go of some power for a change.

Prime Minister and Minister of Education David Lange solved two problems this way. One was the task of getting rid of the old wood from a legacy Ministry he did not control. Anarchy 101: The Red Party needs to destroy or capture all Blue institutions; The Blue Party needs to destroy or capture all Red institutions. It’s almost impossible to restructure an existing organisation and its management and its culture so what Ministers do is delete and replace from scratch with a new team, new logo, new organisation name, and even a new building.

Legacy institution The Department of Education and all its ‘Yes Minister’ drones was thus cut off at a stroke and replaced by a new Labour 4.0 creation still with us in the 2020s: The Ministry of Education.

The second major problem schools have and which Lange had to deal with was, of course, teachers! Always looking for less work and more pay and make particular demands, due to their union’s power within the Labour Party, on a Labour Government. Striking school teachers shouting and waving signs in the streets for better pay conditions is an acute sign that New Zealand is under rule of a Labour Prime Minister. Tomorrow’s Schools disrupted and befuddled the teachers, at least for a while, because now it wasn’t The Government they had to face up to about pay and conditions. Instead it would be people whose power they truly respected and feared. Parents!

Tomorrow’s Schools didn’t just solve political problems for Labour 4.0 though. It put community stake-holders back in charge of their own schools again as their Colonial ancestors had been when they first created their schools and before The State took them over and made them compulsory. Libertarians love this glorious Anarchy and freedom for parents to parent and to influence the education of their own kids.

Teachers, of course, hated it and are still groaning. Schools, not Big Government, decided where teachers would go now. It was a user-facing system again. To facilitate this the Teacher Registration Board was also created in 1989 as a menu for schools to select from. It’s online and you can go and look up your old tormentors if you like and see if they’re still plugging away. Ref. Find a registered teacher, Teaching Council of New Zealand.

“Early in 1988 I went unannounced one lunch-time to see my departmental chiefs at the old wooden building over the road from the Beehive. As far as I could tell, the building was abandoned; I…went back to my office…an apologetic deputation of senior management arrived; they said that as former teachers they were not used to working during January.” – Lange (2005)

“Being a trustee is not a difficult task and the Boards operate much the same as the old School Committees did. The difference is Boards now have the school’s budget to manage and therefore don’t have to get permission from the Ministry of Education to make financial decisions.” She believes the Boards exist to help make decisions and the principals are there to manage schools. “This is working at our school because the parents on our Board treat the teaching staff as the professionals in education….One of the biggest benefits of the BOT’s is having the authority to choose a principal with whom the Trustees are comfortable and who will have the attitude towards children and staff that focal parents tale.” – Lyn Gage, quoted in Walshaw (1993)

None of this is to suggest that Lange or even his advisors, like the architect of Tomorrow’s Schools, Brian Picot, really wanted to help children or parents. This is made very clear in Lange’s co-authored work at the time about early childhood with Anne Meade where they describe parenting as a myth!

Rather, it solved political problems for Labour 4.0 as already pointed out. The solution was of the same sort used on voters by providing them with the perception that they had power thanks for the smoke and mirrors of local government reforms. New Zealand’s human sheep were getting hard to manage by Big Brother so it released a little bit of autonomy in terms of local government of schools and communities to take the heat off of Central Government. Wellington kept the power and made the trouble while local people were left to quibble among themselves about their particular local problems and take them out on mostly powerless figureheads such as mayors and Board of Trustee Chairmen. Ref. Elwoodian Democracy, AHNZ

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Ref. Khandallah School 100 Years, 1893 – 1993, Helen Walshaw (1993)

Ref. 1988: The Meade Report, AHNZ

Ref. 1989: The Great Amalgamation, AHNZ

Ref. 1989: Brian’s Revolution, AHNZ

Ref. 2015: Kāhui Ako: A Cluster Schmuck of Learning, AHNZ

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