Frances Nelson

Wellington, Feb 17 NZPA - Primary teachers are calling on the Government to ignore an "ideologically-driven" report on school choice.

Education Minister Anne Tolley is approaching it cautiously and says she will consider it.

A working group of MPs from National, ACT and the Maori Party prepared the report, a modified version of the education voucher scheme for the worst and best performing students.

They want parents of the 20 percent worst performing and 5 percent best performing students to be given greater choice about how and where the child is educated, taking their government funding with them.

The teacher union NZEI described the report as "a convoluted mish-mash of ideas taken from a previous era and modelled on overseas systems such as American charter schools and English academies".

"This would simply be a voucher system in disguise, driven by political ideology rather than what is best for childrens' learning," said NZEI president Frances Nelson.

"It's a band-aid approach using a business model which will suck money out of public education."

The report lays out various options that could be considered where a student identified as low or high achieving could use a "learner broker mentor" to help form a learning plan.

That could mean using resources within the school, bringing in outside help to the school, or going to another school or education provider.

A first payment of money could follow the child and if results were achieved a second payment would be made.

The group of MPs wants the Government to set up a taskforce to work out the details of how it would work.

ACT MP Heather Roy, the group's leader, said there was an assumption that any change would cost money but that was not necessarily the case.

"At the moment a certain amount of money is allocated for each primary school child and a slightly higher amount for each secondary school child, but parents very often have little choice as to where they can go and the money is given to the school," she said.

"If the money was given to the parents or the ability to spend that government allocation was given to the parent to decide, I think you would find very quickly parents would seek out the opportunities they wanted."

Previous National governments have looked at education vouchers but faced strong opposition from within the public education sector.

Mrs Roy said she didn't like the use of the word voucher.

"In essence we are providing choice, we are not talking about vouchers."