The Education Review Office gets zero out of 10 from Allan Peachey. “Waste of time,” growls the Rangitoto College principal. “Waste of money.”
Why?
“It’s an instrument for the enforcement of an ideology upon New Zealand.”
Which is?
“Basically, we’ve all got to be the same, one size fits all, there’s one way of doing things, if you don’t do it that way you’re not complying, you’re the subject of criticism.”
Now, as National Party candidate for Tamaki, and therefore certain to become an MP next year, Peachey might be said to be politically biased against the Labour government and any parts thereof. But he hasn’t been elected yet, and as principal for the past 12 years of the country’s biggest school, he’s entitled to his views. There are more of them, too.
“If ever you wanted a telling indictment of the inefficiency of the Education Review Office,” he says, “it’s got to be Cambridge High School. They came in like a dirty great sledgehammer after the media had kicked up a fuss. Where were they in the years before that?”
Peachey has a point. ERO’s report on Cambridge High in October 2000 faulted the school’s finances, but praised its teaching and curriculum delivery. A supplementary review last year found no teacher concerns with bullying or feeling unsafe. But in July this year, in the wake of North & South’s cover story on Cambridge, ERO suddenly found (among many other things) an unsafe working environment; poor quality assurance systems for curriculum and assessment; excessive control by the principal; and a divided board.
Nor did ERO’s mate NZQA do much better. When its officers visited the school last year to check up on the progress of NCEA, they completely missed the notorious achievement recovery room – since deemed an abuse of the system, and abolished.
All of which makes you wonder whether there are other Cambridge Highs out there – and whether ERO and NZQA would fail to pick them up, too.
“I’ve no doubt about it,” says National education spokesperson Bill English, “because it is too easy to fox them. There’s no reason to believe everything’s changed since Cambridge. If I was the minister, after Cambridge I’d have run up a big red flag and had a very serious review of how those two agencies work. None of that has happened.”
On the contrary, everyone in the education bureaucracy from the minister down has purred with EROgenous satisfaction. Cambridge was a regrettable one-off, they say; the system is fundamentally robust. The office itself points out that, according to a recent survey, 90 percent of schools find the review process helpful; and chief review officer Karen Sewell assures the public that the checks and balances are working.
“One of the things that we have noticed over the last four or five years,” says Sewell, “is that members of the public and parents are making more complaints direct to ERO about what’s happening in the school and early childhood sector – because they have confidence that we will do something about it.”
Set up in 1989 as part of Tomorrow’s Schools, ERO is a booming business: in the fifth year of a six-year programme aimed at triennial reviews of all schools (the current average review frequency is 3.6 years for primary schools and 3.2 for secondary), it now employs 120 review officers – an increase of 15 percent in a year. During 2003/04 it did a phenomenal 900 reviews.
Not bad for an organisation that was lucky to survive when Labour came to power in 1999. In Opposition, Labour planned to re-incorporate ERO into the Education Ministry. Helen Clark fretted about its overconcern with issues of legal compliance and its tendency to identify problems without offering solutions (the “naming and shaming” approach).
In office, however, Labour was persuaded to keep ERO as a stand-alone agency, provided that it worked to a principle of “improvement rather than compliance”. ERO now takes a more consultative and inclusive approach. The somewhat flinty profile it had when Judith Aitken was chief review officer has softened under Sewell. “ERO is nothing more than its instructions, if you like,” says Paul Ferris, president of the Secondary Principals’ Association – and Labour’s instructions have clearly been: don’t frighten the teachers and middle-class parents on whom we rely for votes.
Yes, says Peachey, ERO had some rigour when Aitken was in charge; but that’s long since gone.
“ERO is a prime example of the bureau-cratisation of education in New Zealand,” he says. “I can’t recall ever having met an education review officer where I would say, wow, that person must have been a great teacher, how can I get to employ them in my school?
“By and large, they send in people who have no experience in leading schools, who have no understanding of the complexity of the sort of decisions that, for example, principals make – people who can’t even win the respect of other teachers as great teachers; whereas the [pre-ERO] inspectors were often inspectors because they were highly respected for their ability to teach and for what they could offer in terms of improving teaching in a school.”
Consequently, says Peachey, reviews are a virtually meaningless exercise. “Be a good lad and tick all the boxes [and] they’ll work alongside you. But the moment you say that doesn’t work, we’re not having that mediocrity imposed on our school, we’re going to have teachers make kids learn, they’re into you.”
His solution? He would abolish ERO and replace it with a much more locally based inspection system focused solely on classroom teaching. He hasn’t thought it right through, he admits, but he’d like to see something along the lines of a data-driven Education Standards Authority that “monitors the extent to which children are made to learn in schools” – as opposed to the current system, in which “people are much more interested in bits of paper and policies and political correctness … [and whether] teachers have an adequate understanding of the Treaty of Waitangi”.
Peachey says that far too many principals are criticised by ERO for bad staff management practices when all they’ve done is deal with teachers who don’t make kids learn. “Suddenly, they’re damned as bad employers; and ERO soaks all that up and feeds off it. It’s like they have a feeding frenzy on any effort by principals to improve the standards of teaching.”
ERO’s ultimate failure, he says, is the failure to understand that good schools are about culture, not organisation. “ERO wants schools to have a culture of organisation where you move boxes in an organisation chart and that’s school improvement. Whereas people like myself say that is garbage. School improvement is changing the culture of learning.”
We’d better listen to this man. He could be Minister of Education one day. But is he just sore because ERO gave his school a poor report? The 2002 review of Rangitoto College was critical of the board for not meeting key legislative requirements and contractual obligations. True, two years later, ERO was able to report that the college had successfully addressed the matters raised in the previous report; there is a distinct tendency, though, for ERO to receive its most scathing criticism from schools that have had unfavourable reviews.
“I think you’d expect that, wouldn’t you,” says Sewell gently. “Schools are for children, but adults are the framework around what happens for children, and adults do get bruised by the process. Generally, however, we are able to move beyond that.”
And, she adds, “I guess if we weren’t being criticised – some of the time, anyway – then we wouldn’t be doing a good job.”
Are they doing a good job? English gives them a pass mark and Ferris, whose organisation represents most high-school principals, agrees. He seems to imply that wider issues muddied the Cambridge waters, when he says, “You’ve got to remember that at one point the minister flagged Cambridge High School as being the school that every-one should emulate, because they all thought that the results they were getting were wonderful, and I suppose that ERO’s glasses weren’t focused on the detail of Cambridge’s procedure until the minister and the public became aware of just how that was being achieved.”
ERO can only do so much, says Ferris. “It’s the school’s job to prove to ERO, when they come, that they have a process for continuous improvement and self-review. From time to time there will be schools that get past ERO and won’t be seen, but generally ERO can see through a school that is not genuinely engaged in that self-improvement.”
He agrees with Peachey’s “one size fits all” criticism, but says you’ve got to have a measure common to all schools. “Allan, of course, like all of us, has worn that; and where principals have stepped outside the norm, then ERO and NZQA can be quite cutting. But [Cambridge High principal] Alison Annan stepped outside the norm and she was chopped right down, so his argument isn’t quite fair there.”
No respect for ERO officers? “Secondary principals would have some sympathy for part of what he’s saying, but not all of it. Generally, secondary principals would find some measure of tension when ERO visits the school, because it is a time of public review. But they often find tension when they find that some of the review officers don’t have any experience of being in a secondary school and understanding the dynamics of a secondary school. A review officer doesn’t necessarily come from our end of the education system – they could be early-childhood or middle-childhood people.”
The last time his school (Kavanagh College in Dunedin) was reviewed, says Ferris, none of the review officers had ever had leadership of a big school.
Sewell says, however, that a healthy 12-14 percent of ERO’s officers are former principals, “and we maintain it at about that level. Many of the rest of our staff have been senior managers, deputy principals, heads of department.” What’s more, all 46 new staff employed in the past two years have had recent school experience. The fact that a number of staff are lured back to be principals after ERO training strikes her as a “very positive statement about the quality of staff that ERO’s employing”.
As for Peachey’s other criticisms, Sewell responds:
Cambridge: This year’s was the eighth review – in itself an indication of concern, as most high schools have had three or four fewer – “and that review was set up before all this information became public; we were going there, anyway”. She doesn’t feel that they missed anything on earlier visits. “In the report that was confirmed in February 2003 you will find serious concerns – that were there in the previous report, too – about matters to do with student behaviour, the management of student behaviour, and student suspensions. And we know, from all the data we’ve collected from schools over the last 14 or 15 years, that matters to do with suspension and exclusion are indicators of risk.”
(As for recovery rooms, “We haven’t found any others, and I think it’s unlikely, given the media attention that’s been focused on it, that we will. One thing we know about ERO is that if we start asking questions, people start to make sure that they have the answers.”)
One size fits all: “Each review is sufficiently flexible to meet the needs of all schools.”
Focus on culture of organisation: “The way a school is organised is quite important for the delivery [of learning], but it’s not the focus. The focus is on what’s happening to children in classrooms.”
Superiority of school inspectors: “I was a school inspector once, and I don’t remember people being as thrilled about me then as they remember being now.”
As for the idea that it’s easy to fox ERO, Sewell says that’s wishful thinking. Her officers know what to look for and can tell when a school’s in trouble. “Of course, there are incentives for wanting to present yourself as well as you can … I mean, I wanted to portray the school I was at in the best possible light …”
Well, she would, wouldn’t she, say critics unimpressed by Sewell’s own leadership of Green Bay High School in Waitakere City, where she was principal for 12 years before joining ERO. Roll numbers dropped as parents, dismayed by poor exam results under what was seen by some as a “lurch to the liberal Left”, moved their children to other schools. Ferris won’t comment on Sewell’s time as a principal, nor will Sewell herself. English says she had a mixed reputation but that shouldn’t have any bearing on her current role, as “to be fair, it’s a different job: it’s not running a school, it’s running ERO”.
More alarmingly, perhaps, Sewell once taught a third-former called Trevor Mallard …