EDUCATION - New Zealand's archilies heel

Truancy is a major catastrophe for all New Zealanders. 45% of Maori and Pacifica students regularly do not attend school. This means that this cohort will be unlikely to participate in our future workforce, because they can’t read and write. Technology is replacing unskilled jobs at a staggering rate, and this growing “under-class” is likely to send New Zealand into third world status.

Minister Chris Hipkins and his socialist Labour Government, by ignoring this growing issue, are damaging New Zealand’s future more than any other government action.

Hipkins needs to go from Education – NOW.

Labour and the Education Ministry’s ongoing failure of the poor

Source: Kiwiblog, August 31, 2021 by Alwyn Poole

Once again the “Matthew Effect” is in action – the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer.

Students in Decile 1-3 high schools in New Zealand have 1/3rd less opportunity to learn compared to students in the top 3 deciles – Decile 8-10. The average full attendance at Decile 1-3 is 41% and in the top three deciles 66%. And worse, the pattern over time is down (-3%) in attendance from 2018-2020 for Deciles 1-3 students, and up 3% for students in Decile 8-10 schools.

The disadvantage across our system can also be shown through daily attendance. Even for our system as a whole in terms of per – day attendance at our schools – we have massive gaps between ethnicities, regions and deciles.

On the Monday before the latest long-down very close to 1 in 5 decile one students were not in school. For high decile schools only 1 in 10 was absent. On that Monday 92% of Asian students were at school 88 for European, 83% for Maori and Pasifika students. Auckland and Canterbury topped the regions whereas Te Tai Tokerau was the worst.

Daily figures are here:

https://www.educationcounts.govt.nz/__data/assets/pdf_file/0008/208880/Schools-16-Aug-20-Aug-2021-Weekly-Attendance-Report.pdf

We also have 80 high schools in NZ (I have the lists by school name) that have lost 30% of their students by their 17th birthday and 24 of those have lost 40% of their students.

All keep in mind that we have 10,500 students not even enrolled in school.

The input factors in education MUST be addressed by all political parties and by the Ministry responsible.

Keep in mind the Ministry of Educations motto is:

“We shape an education system that delivers equitable and excellent outcomes.”

Even with UE the State failures are all too obvious. Private Schools students get UE at 81% (which is why Labour MPs tend to send their kids to them), State Integrated at 65%, State at 39%.

We are condemning many of the most in need to an adulthood with massively limited opportunities and very low aspirations and the demographics flow-on is in plain sight daily.

I have been working through a full data set that has information/rankings on every high school in New Zealand. A cart load of work but should be of high interest to policy writers and commentators. Not free but for anyone looking for high quality in depth data it will save many hours: alwyn.poole@gmail.com

Roy Morgan Political Polls

A SIGNIFICANT NUMBER OF NEW ZEALANDERS OVERESTIMATE SEA-LEVEL RISE – LATEST RESEARCH

Latest Research by Victoria University’s NZ Sea Rise programme is part of the public engagement research. The study notes that:

“Overestimating the risk of sea-level rise can be as much a problem as underestimating it, because it can lead to public anxiety and feelings of helplessness, rather than motivation to take action to mitigate and adapt.”

The NZ SeaRise project is a $7.1 million, five year (2018-2023) research programme funded by the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment. It is hosted at Victoria University of Wellington and lead by Associate Professor Richard Levy and Professor Tim Naish. The overarching goal of the programme is to improve predictions of sea-level rise in New Zealand to 2100 and beyond…

Confusion about sea-level rise projections

In 2019, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reported that between 1902 and 2015, global sea level rose by 16cm on average. The process has been accelerating in recent decades, as ice loss from the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets has increased. According to the IPCC, the planet will likely experience 0.24-0.32m of sea-level rise by 2050. What happens beyond 2050 depends on how successful we are at reducing carbon emissions.

In 2017, the Ministry for the Environment published projections for New Zealand of 0.46–1.05m of sea-level rise by 2100, depending on how quickly global carbon emissions are reduced.

The NZ SeaRise programme is working to finetune projections because the sea doesn’t rise universally along the coastline.

Site specific projections

The NZ SeaRise programme is preparing a set of location-specific sea-level rise projections, taking into account global and regional projections of sea-level changes and new knowledge of local vertical land movements, including subsidence and earthquake uplift.

New Zealand straddles a tectonic plate boundary and the land moves up and down as a result.

This movement can be large and rapid during major earthquakes, but is relatively continuous along most coastal regions between earthquakes.

For example, measurements from satellites show that today, regions of the lower east coast of the North Island are going down at rates up to 8mm per year and areas along the central Bay of Plenty coast are rising at rates over 10mm per year. Sea-level rise is amplified in places where land is subsiding, and dampened where it is going up.

Adding continuous estimates of vertical land movement to our sea-level projections shows future increases in the frequency of coastal flooding due to global sea-level rise will happen decades sooner than expected in areas that are going down, and vice versa.

HEAT MAP OF TAURANGA – SHOWING LANS MASS RISE

Criticisms of the "deficit model" of science communication show that encouraging action on an issue - such as sea-level rise - is not as simple as ensuring that people are fully informed. But it is essential they have access to reliable scientific information that can inform their decisions.

I have never denied the risk of increased storm effect, but small island nations (including New Zealand) – especially around the Pacific “Ring of Fire” – have long been known to rise (or fall) as a result of tectonic plate movements.

Take Tauranga City for instance (see Map above). The only parts of Tauranga City that has fallen is Sulphur Point, Judea industrial area and Brooks Street (Fraser Cove) industrial – all reclaimed land (not rocket science to understand why.

Before we panic the masses (something that this current Labour Government is making an art form of), let’s be sure that we are using the best science-based data to base our predictions on. I rest my case.