Kia ora koutou katoa

Issue: Volume 100, Number 16

Posted: 8 December 2021
Reference #: 1HARte

You have responded to the volatility of Covid-19 with resilience, flexibility, creativity, and – most importantly – commitment to the wellbeing and learning of our ākonga. Thank you.

Iona Holsted, Secretary of Education

Iona Holsted, Secretary of Education

All of these qualities and more have been on display in the pages of Education Gazette this year. I hope you have enjoyed taking inspiration from your colleagues around the motu, as well as the opportunities to reflect on change and progress provided by the special centenary editions of the Gazette.    

Through the launch of Education Gazette in 1921, the Director of Education at the time, John Caughley, and the then Department of Education, were seeking to create greater connection and unified action across the education system, as well as strengthen the teaching of the syllabus. In the intervening years the education system has swung towards tight centralisation (from about the 1940s through to the 1980s), and then the other way toward high devolution and independence through the 1989 Tomorrow’s Schools reforms.

On reading Mr Caughley’s introduction to the very first Education Gazette, his description of the challenges of a lack of coordination across the system are familiar. Rebalancing the system to be more connected and coherent is the intent behind the Government’s decisions to reform the Tomorrow’s Schools system. 

One of those decisions was given life earlier this year with the establishment of Te Mahau (formerly referred to as an “Education Service Agency”) within a redesigned Te Tāhuhu o te Mātauranga | Ministry of Education. The launch of Te Mahau on 4 October 2021 was a low-key affair – and not only because everyone’s attention was rightly focused on the Covid response. 

Low key, because until the ambitions translate into action, they are just good intentions. 

Over time, Te Mahau will provide more responsive and accessible supports to educators, leaders, ākonga and their whānau. It is the experience that you have of working with us, and the results that ensue, that will be celebrated.  

Thank you again for all your hard work this year. I wish you a safe, restful and warm break to recharge and reconnect with whānau and friends. 

Ngā mihi nui

Iona Holsted
Te Tumu Whakarae mō te Mātauranga
Secretary for Education  

 

1 November 1921 – 
The New Zealand Education Gazette

The two chief aims of the Department in issuing this Gazette are – to assist teachers individually in their work, and to co-ordinate and concentrate the efforts of all teacher towards effecting some general systematic advance in certain phases of education in New Zealand. Naturally these aims will be correlative.

The assistance given to individual teachers individually will be varied in character. It will include the periodical supply of… official information… [including] notices of vacant positions…

The Gazette will supply… suggestions, explanations, and information concerning the syllabus instruction… it will bring to the notice of teachers, books, papers,
or articles likely to be helpful… Some of the articles will be original[s] contributed by officers of the Department, including Inspectors, as well as by leading teachers…

Beyond all individual – and what are often empirical – efforts to improve school-work, there is a real need for a united study of principles of education… in this study the Department, … the inspectors, must work hand in hand with the teachers… At present there is no adequate means of providing for co-ordination of study, practice and principles.The field is so wide open that any investigation...is spasmodic, disconnected and lacking in persistence. It is hoped that the Gazette will be the means of giving a lead in this connection, and even if progress is slow, it is likely to be more general and sure, so that each advance should form a sound basis for the next stage.

“It behoves each of us to play our part so as to make the utmost of our capacities and our opportunities... Whatever our difficulties and our restrictions may be, our aim should be to get 110 per cent of efficiency out of the powers and means now at our disposal, while using all reasonable means to have any obstacles or hindrances removed.”

John Caughley
Director of Education

 

BY Education Gazette editors
Education Gazette | Tukutuku Kōrero, reporter@edgazette.govt.nz

Posted: 12:45 pm, 8 December 2021

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