Dear Editor, This letter has been a long time in the making and is tough to write, but I felt compelled to express my frustration and disappointment with our current education system in the perhaps forlorn hope that it might help kickstart a national conversation about the present state of affairs as it relates to our children’s secondary school education here on Rarotonga.

I’m using a nom de plume to protect my child at the school from any potential bullying or discrimination that might otherwise result from its publication.

It pains me to write this, but it’s pretty much common knowledge that our premier education facility, Tereora College, is on life support and is well on its way to becoming a completely dysfunctional and toxic learning environment – and this is affecting students and teachers alike.

My child is a local Cook Islander, and a high achiever who unfortunately is being held back by a system that is simply not performing even the most basic functions. Reports coming back to us as parents include: regular fights breaking out during class hours, non-students hanging around the school, vaping in the classroom, disruptions to teaching, and teachers being tasked with delivering content that they are absolutely not familiar with. The ‘Anau’ classes are in my view pointless, and are basically used as an excuse to avoid actual teaching in the classroom, as they can run sometimes for over an hour in the mornings. Teacher only days? I never heard of such a thing in my day, because isn’t that what the term breaks are for? In any case, they should be organised so they are not cutting into actual learning time for students.

Here some of my thoughts on how to fix a broken system:

1. If there are teacher shortages, then for heaven’s sake, tap into the very well-resourced online learning systems currently on offer from New Zealand, including at all NCEA levels, rather than using teachers who are not familiar with the subject matter to run these classes. (Refer: https://www.tekura.school.nz/learn-with-us/online-learning-platform/). Explore the virtual learning environments that are currently available and work with New Zealand Education counterparts to deliver this to our students where there are human resource deficiencies at the school.

2. Get more expatriate teachers on short term contracts. I’m all for positive discrimination when supporting local teachers, but this has to be where they have commensurate skills and not coming at the detriment to our students. If necessary, secure funding to build onsite accommodation to house these expat teachers and provide subsidised rent to incentivise them to come here.

3. In the meantime, consider sending our young Cook Islands teachers down to NZ as part of an exchange system and embed them into NZ schools so they can learn how a properly functioning school system should operate, to then come back after a year or two to implement this knowledge into our school.

4. Reduce the micro-managing from the Ministry of Education (MOE) up the hill, I have heard that Tereora admin staff still need a works order to get photocopiers fixed, and there are regular budget shortfalls affecting the basic operation of the school. This is a reason there is frequently no budget to operate even the state-of-the-art cooking equipment that was announced to much fanfare some years ago. Ongoing maintenance is a problem, and the IT computer school block was recently so badly flooded that the rain was actually heavier inside the building than it was outside!

5. There are many school funding and management models that are being used to great success currently on the island. This keeps the meddling from MOE at arm’s length, and provides the School Boards running them with more independent budget and control of the learning environment. This is something that should be investigated as a priority for Tereora, with the added advantage that it frees up MOE resources to focus on other important things and follow up with audits as required.

6. Enforce a more strict discipline at the school on the students. Respect levels for the teachers appear to be at an all-time low, and this needs to be rectified as a priority. Disruptive students should be separated from the class and assessed for mental/emotional/behavioural problems and then dealt with appropriately. There is no reason why such students should be allowed to disrupt and distract the other students as the current situation appears to be.

7. I have no idea what is going on in some of the homes of these students, but clearly some parents are just not raising their children correctly and it’s not the school’s responsibility to have to do a parent’s job. Stronger action by Government/Police/Community leaders/Church groups etc needs to be taken in this regard. We all need to do better, because this challenge needs all hands on deck.

8. Improve feedback to parents. I don’t want to talk to ‘Anau’ teachers, I want to talk to the ones who are actually teaching my child, so I can get feedback straight from the horse’s mouth. Even now, results are taking a long time to be posted to the online portal, and we are often in the dark as to how our child is tracking for long periods of time because results are slow to be put up.

9. Undertake a comprehensive review of Tereora College by an independent NZ or Australian based review panel to identify the systemic shortcomings, and provide recommendations to address these and any other gaps that may be identified. Appoint a counterpart panel here comprising former education specialists, a teachers representative and a parents representative, as well as someone from the Chamber of Commerce/business community to assess alternative models of service delivery for the school. The report would be provided to Parliament for support and Cabinet direction given to MFEM to allocate the funding required to implement these reforms.

10. Implement interim measures to improve staff morale. I’m actually not sure if this is an issue, but I do know that our teachers are not paid near enough to teach our kids, despite the best efforts over the years by concerned parents to pressure politicians and senior policy makers to bring salaries up.

This leads me to my final point, which is that our politicians need to wake the hell up. Instead of jetting around the globe attending to things that are not a priority, they all, every one of them, need to start to get it into their heads that our children are the best investment they can make for this country. THEY are the priority for this country, not endless bloody infrastructure projects, roads or airports in the Pa Enua – usually the result of some pork barrel politics. These may be important to some degree, but the absolute priority in my view is our children, and in particular the ones about to enter the workforce. When I look at the kind of sophistication other small countries have adopted in the way they select and develop the skills that are required to build their countries’ economies and societies (I’m looking at Singapore, who became independent around the same time we did) I just despair at the utter lack of creativity and intellectual capital we have invested into our schooling system to ensure we keep up with global standards and in designing innovative education solutions that are fit for our purposes.

As a nation, we like to brag about how successful we are with our tourism dependent economy, yet none of this vast wealth seems to be filtering down into our social systems, and especially with Education. It is both depressing and annoying that our politicians and senior policy people are too blind to see that our social systems, including policing, health, law and order, and above all, education, remain third-world level at best. The ones who can afford it are sending their kids away to be educated in NZ and elsewhere, and this just shouldn’t have to be the case.

So, I implore the Minister, Mac – you insisted on employing your mate Owen to the post of Secretary, and we weren’t off to a good start when he left for some reason to Paris, but now he is back and we desperately need change and reform at Tereora.

After all, as I said at the outset, this is our premier learning institution, it is where we prepare our students for entry into the workforce and develop the skills we need as a country to progress and achieve the development goals we have set for ourselves – to build a strong and prosperous nation and to realise our potential. At the moment, we are failing badly. We are failing our kids and we are failing ourselves – let’s do better!

I await your positive and hopefully non-defensive response, because I and many others want to know what the plan here is, if indeed there is one.

Joe TP

(Name and address supplied)