Labour MP and former education minister Trevor Mallard has suggested that the school system might be spending too effort on working with the bottom fifth of students at the expense of “the most talented kids”. Giving a lecture in Wellington on Tuesday this week, Mallard noted efforts to make sure the school system responds...
Read more →The Herald has an opinion piece from Auckland Council’s chief economist, Geoff Cooper, about inequality and why education offers the best route to tackling it. Now, it’s great to see an economist, and one working for an increasingly influential body, talking about income gaps. But, just like the Treasury, he’s arguing for a very...
Read more →In one of life’s great ironies, it’s just come to my attention that Talent 2, the company behind Novopay, was the sponsor last year of an award for ‘public sector communications’. The award itself was well-deserved: it went to the Department of Corrections for making prisons smokefree and the way they got staff and...
Read more →Another day, another study showing how an unfair tax system is helping widen the gap between the rich and the rest. It’s a US study this time, which finds that the biggest reason for widening wealth gaps 1991-2006 is the capital gains and dividends going to the top 1%. These kind of windfalls are...
Read more →Could money be saved by turning empty office blocks, and even old Woolworths shops, into schools? Bristol Cathedral choir school’s principal, Neil Blundell, is striding along the corridor of the school’s newest building, the Parsonage, when he spots a pupil leaning against the wall, shirt-tails peeping out from beneath his sweater. “Would you like...
Read more →Haringey council “squandered” the equivalent of 700 social workers’ salaries on private consultants while overstretched staff failed to save Baby P, the Standard can reveal. Sharon Shoesmith’s department for children spent £23.8 million on external advisers for the borough’s school renovation programme between 2005 and 2008. The money – four times the recommended level...
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