User:Realitylink/Currie report draft

In 1960, a Commission on Education in New Zealand was set up by the government to report on a wide range of matters within the country's education system. The Commission, chaired by George Currie, vice-Chancellor of the University of New Zealand at the time, was asked to "examine primary, secondary and technical education in relation to the present needs of the country", and after hearing five hundred submissions, eight areas of concern were identified. These included training and conditions of service for teachers, possible re-structuring of school administration, acknowledging that education of Māori needed to reflect "equality of opportunity", monitoring of the quality of school work through assessment practices, reviewing the legal basis for religious education in schools and government aid to private schools.

In 1962 the Commission's produced its findings in the Currie Report. With over eight hundred pages and more than three hundred recommendations, the Report was noted by one writer as "a full-length study of the education system...the most comprehensive exercise in educational planning so far undertaken in New Zealand", and acknowledged as a key policy statement with recommendations for legislation, including the Education Act (1964) which later lowered the compulsory school starting age from 7 years to 6 years. Summarising progress in the implementation of the Commissions recommendations in 1972, John Ewing, a former lecturer in education at Victoria University of Wellington and Chief Inspector of Primary Schools, noted that at the time, 134 of the 328 recommendations had been fully implemented, 155 were being considered or implemented in part and 39 had failed to gain support. The writer suggested that changes were on a "broad front...[largely because]...the Commission recognised, supported, and encouraged the main trends and tendencies in the growth of the system [explaining why] a great many of the changes...were expansions of existing services". A study in 1978 claimed that the areas covered by the Commission were "too extensive...too numerous...and beyond all financial resources to be of much practical value", but noted that almost a quarter of the recommendation in the Report "related to the recruitment, training and working conditions of teachers". A recommendation for smaller class sizes was put on hold until the changes were made to teacher training and there was little support for suggested modifications to the administrative structure of the education system. The transfer of Māori schools to the education boards was speedily implemented, but some recommendations, such as the "extended use of standardised tests as an alternative to 'checkpoint' tests...were modified in action in ways the Commission could not have forseen". Ewing concluded:"On the whole, the Currie Commission endeavoured to build on to the living and growing system. It wisely avoided laying out a blueprint for the next half century, with all the difficulties, shortcomings, and imponderables that such a task [involved]. It planned very largely from what existed, and this [gave] strength to its findings. Most of its recommendations...led to action and change, and some of them...absorbed into the new machinery of educational planning."

Later commentators agreed the Report was generally uncritical and expressed and reinforced "what it took [at the time] to be a national consensus about the development, aims and the role of the education system". The Commission's findings were noted as unanimous and showed no disagreement with themes that underpinned New Zealand educational goals and beliefs at the time. These held that the key goal of schooling was to provide equality of educational equality, the system was moving toward this, changes were beneficial and the state should continue to "provide and control education in the system". This situated the Report within the context of a shared belief in the 1950s and 1960s in New Zealand that education was one of the state welfare reforms [that] "in the interests of social equality was widely regarded as a central and distinctive aspect of New Zealand's national identity...[reflecting]...a democratic and egalitarian aspiration". Postwar New Zealand was seen as stable with little criticism of the state, which "led many educational commentators and historians to celebrate the gradual progress and potential benefits of public education in New Zealand".