Advisory body slams Picot report

Press, 16 June 1988, Page 5

Advisory body slams Picot report

By

JENNY LONG

The classroom teacher is seen as less important than school buildings by the Picot task force on education administration, says the president of the National Advisory Services Association, Mr David Chapple.

He said that teachers, the “most important and costly resource in schools, appeared to have received scant attention” in the report. The advisory association represents school advisers, who work with teachers, advising on school subjects and new curriculum. As well as subject advisers, there are also rural school, and junior class advisers, and resource teachers of reading.

The Picot report recommended that the advisers should not be directly Government funded, as they are at present, although the new Ministry could contract for their

services. Mr Chapple said the association was not arguing for retention of the same service, but saw the need for a professional support unit, of which the advisory services would be an important part. Advisers could help teachers to “cross-polli-nate” ideas, because they were able to see lessons in many different schools, Mr Chapple said. Education Department publications, which had won world acclaim, such as the Ready to Read series, and the Beginning School Mathematics, would not have been so successful in New Zealand if advisers had not been in the schools, he said. Mr Chapple said that while some submissions to the Picot report had been critical of the advisory services, that was because of a shortage of advisers and should not be seen as a reflection on their work.

“Also, a lot of our work is in bolstering teachers’ self-esteem and morale, and that is not a marketable commodity,” he said. The association had been bolstered by the positive and flexible approach being taken by the Minister of Education, Mr Lange, who had shown that he valued the work done by advisers.

“If it wasn’t for him, we would have lost a lot of advisers already,” Mr Chapple said.

He said the association would be keen to see a new professional support service, set up with its own charter, the same way as the report recommended for all learning institutions.

The suggestion by one of the task force members, Dr Peter Ramsay, that the advisory services should be attached to teachers colleges was unacceptable because it was too restrictive, Mr Chapple said.