Wider Secondary Planning Urged

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 32295, 13 May 1970, Page 16

Wider Secondary Planning Urged

District planning of secondary education on a co-ordinated basis and a possible extension of the Department of Education’s regional planning unit were suggested at the opening in Christchurch yesterday morning of the Secondary School Boards’ Association’s southern conference.

The regional superintendent of education (Mr H. M. McMillan) said that continuing difficulties over the resiting

of Dunedin’s King Edward Technical High School had shown how his department needed a bigger planning unit with a geographer, a statistician and a larger architectural staff. Mr McMillan said that the “fairly serene” secondary school scene in Christchurch could be attributed largely to the advisory work of the Christchurch Secondary Schools' Council.

Mr McMillan emphasised the need for closer liaison with secondary school boards New .Zealand education had hardly faced up to the need for collective responsibility of various secondary school boards, the former superintendent of education for the southern region (Mr S. S. P. Hamilton) told the conference.

“There is nothing in the secondary school system to parallel the primary boards,” he said. Many recommendations had been made based on the proposition that a greater degree of local responsibility could be given to a body which was sufficiently broad in its composition and terms of reference to view the needs of a given district as a whole, he said.

“But all proposals have; been’ rejected as a threat to the autonomy of the individual boards of governors.” These boards placed too much emphasis, perhaps, on their right of individualaccess to the Department of' Education and to the Minister, Mr Hamilton said. Closer co-ordination of educational planning as recom-, (mended by the Currie report of 1962 may have been too top heavy but it could provide a starting point in the search for a solution. “It seems to have been quietly forgotten,” he said. Mr Hamilton suggested that the system of district secondary school councils strengthened and used more widely could supply a suitable alternative. A wide application of the system of the Christchurch Secondary Schools’ Council throughout the southern region would provide effective machinery for joint planning with the regional office of (education. i Such councils would be 1i broadly responsible for co- ■ ordinating the intake of secondary schools, initiating 11 planning, general supervision i of the building of new schools >iand advising the superintenIdent on district priorities.