Editorial: Education cuts not a good look

THE WELLINGTONIAN

OPINION: Moroccan mosaic tiling classes or twilight golf lessons were easy adult community education targets for the government cost-cutters, and they are difficult to defend.

Why should hard-pressed taxpayers contribute to the cost of middle-class white folks' hobby lessons? They also make for glib and snappy political statements.

But Education Minister Anne Tolley should take more care with her generalisations.

The golf lessons were her example, picked at random from Wellington High School's adult education prospectus during an interview with The Wellingtonian to make her point. Her press officer phoned our office later to ask for the quote to be removed from the story because, he said, they had discovered that the twilight golf lessons were not, in fact, taxpayer subsidised.

Moroccan mosaic tiling was another of her examples and it may have even been a worse one.

One of our front-page stories this week concerns the imminent loss of the award-winning Chinese Senior Community's Mandarin-language computer skills course.

This is aimed at older Chinese immigrants the grandparents who have followed their emigrating families to New Zealand.

While their grandchildren learn and practise English with their schoolmates, and their children speak it at work, the grandparents are isolated at home.

Computer skills have opened a world of social interaction for them.

However, the programme will probably close at the end of this year because Wellington High School is unlikely to be able to continue to fund it after the adult community education cuts announced in the Budget take effect.

We would have liked Chinese National MP Pansy Wong's viewpoint on this, but she refused to comment.

Another Wellingtonian story in July highlighted the situation of Isaak Mohammed.

He is a Sudanese refugee who, after two years of English learning at Educational Training Consultants in Newtown, will be ready to begin tertiary education next year.

School manager Marty Pilott told us that, in future, it would be forced to decline people such as Mr Mohammed.

More rigid enforcement of the Tertiary Education Commission rules mean students must learn enough English in one year of training to move on either to work or tertiary training, or the school will lose funding for their places.

Wellington's assessor of migrants' English training needs, Judi McCallum, apparently won't be needed after this year her position has been disestablished.

Ms McCallum is paid by the Education Ministry via the Social Development Ministry.

The fact that her position will no longer be required is surely an indictment on the Government's adult education policies.

Meanwhile, the Education Minister has allocated $35 million to further subsidise private schools over the next four years.

Joining those dots doesn't make for a pretty picture.

Cuts to English training for maimed African refugees, cuts to computer training for elderly Chinese immigrants, attacks on Moroccan art lessons ... new subsidies for affluent, mainly white families.

It's not a good look and it doesn't smell too flash, either.