David Seymour's Enduring Love for Charter Schools

The seeds of large scale privatisation have started with the diversion of resources from our public schools to private, secretively held, charter schools

This article is open for all readers. Video at the end.

Summary:

David Seymour has championed charter schools for over a decade, arguing that it will enhance productivity and create a better society for all. ACT-National’s last experiment saw charter schools spend $125 million of taxpayer funds over 8 years, under a constant stream of inconsistent and poor outcomes - while private sponsors profited.

The average annual operational cost per charter school student is ~3x those of public schools. This time, Luxon and Willis gave $153 million over 4 years for Seymour to establish 50 charter schools - 35 to be converted from the State. That doubles the experimental budget from the last round - no wonder Seymour was chuffed.

There are many unpleasant and shocking surprises hidden in Seymour’s legislation - all designed to shield charter schools from transparency and public accountability, and privatise NZ’s education system. Seymour also specifies the private schools can take resources from an already stretched public school system

A Love Affair of over 10 years

David Breen Seymour appreciates charter schools. That much is clear. He has been championing the cause for as long as he has been an MP. i.e. a decade

In 2018, when Brian Tamaki’s Destiny Church application was declined again, because the Ministry of Education feared pupils would be coerced into attending the church, and the application contained a number of other inconsistencies, Seymour stood on the grounds of Parliament House, and personally apologised, with the words, “Destiny should have had a charter school.”

Seymour called Brian Tamaki’s outfit an “excellent, independent school in South Auckland” but said “the establishment against (it) was too strong.”

He stood by his apology to Tamaki in May 2024.

In 2022, in his State of the Union speech, Seymour again made it clear charter schools needed to come back after Labour stopped them in 2018.

Yet the charter school experiment that Seymour championed in his role as Assistant Education Minister in 2014 was expensive, and widely considered a failure. One of its first was shut down in 2016 by National’s Education Minister Hekia Parata - two years after it started. That cost taxpayers $4.8 million. There were a host of problems with it - at its peak it only had 60 students, it also had an inadequate curriculum, weak governance, and poor teaching standards.

At the time, the New Zealand Principals Federation President said:

"Now it is time to reflect on why charter schools are not a good idea for New Zealand before we waste more precious resources on it"

"We said from the start there were flaws in the whole charter school system with no requirement to employ registered teachers and not enough public accountability.”

Over eight full years, the experiment cost taxpayers $125 million with highly inconsistent and poor results, driven by questionable ideology and dubious standards of evidence.

In February, the NZEI Te Riu Roa union proved that the average annual operational cost per charter school student was $18,297, nearly triple the public average of about $6600 during the same period, 2014 to 2018.

The concept of charter schools had been strongly opposed by the opposition and teachers’ unions, but were implemented anyway, as part of the National Party's agreement with ACT in 2011.

And now, in 2024, we see a repeat of history.

Except this time, National is no longer what it once was, and the politics and media landscape has shifted. (More on that in an upcoming post today.)

Prime Minister Christopher Luxon provides constant accomodation to his coalition partners, routinely too scared to call them out, and even going so far as to defend their policies that will kill Kiwis and cost the state billions of dollars. i.e., their pro-tobacco stance which includes funnelling hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars directly to tobacco companies, as needed. Luxon defends David Seymour regularly in Parliament praising Seymour as “an excellent Minister”. And Luxon doesn’t even appear to know what Section 7AA of the Oranga Tamariki Act is based on his Parliamentary response yesterday - despite supporting its repeal. That’s how much he trusts his coalition partners, or perhaps how little he cares for the impacts of his government’s policy on the disenfranchised.

Seymour can act with bravado because Luxon agreed with Peters/Seymour during preliminary talks that his coalition partners could act and it would not be Luxon’s job to pull them back. He has largely kept to his word.

Two days before public submissions on private charter schools was due to close, Seymour changed some significant conditions for the legislation. They are:

1. Limit teachers' employment bargaining rights

2. Give the publicly-funded private schools access to resources available to state

Both are significant.

On the former, it’s startling not to have that draw national attention.

As Laura Walters reported in Newsroom in June, post-budget, teachers and principles were devastated that Erica Stanford broke her promise to fund extra learning support at a time when high needs students continues to increase across Aotearoa NZ.

Instead, $153 million went to establishing David Seymour’s “vanity project” of publicly funded private schools.

But that’s not all, folks.

Teachers, principles and unions say the consultation process is rushed, and they’re warning us - just as our doctors and nurses had warned us about the health system for months - that charter schools will divert desperately needed cash and resources from over-stretched public schools.

This is against a backdrop of more cost cutting from the government as it stops 100 school building projects around the country - from Beach Haven to Ōmokoroa, Western Bay of Plenty, where kids have to travel up to 4 hours a day to get schooling, and down to Otago and Paeroa.

In February, Erica Stanford claimed her “independent, value for money” exercise was “absolutely not” about cost cutting and austerity.

Of course not, Erica. It’s always about the headline, isn’t it, National?

Last month, Post Primary Teachers Association president Chris Abercrombie pointed out that Seymour’s charter school proposal was flawed, arguing:

“By allowing charter schools to have access to state specialist services such as resource teachers, they are admitting that the charter school system can't work and that it needs to be able to cannibalise off the public functions of state education to provide some semblance of effective support for students.”

There are a number of other concerning developments and characteristics to take note of:

1. Teachers in these public funded but privately run schools do not have to be trained and registered,

2. Charter schools would not need to teach the New Zealand Curriculum or provide a New Zealand qualification.

3. If a public school converts to a charter school, then teachers, principals, and all school employees would be forced to either transfer to the new charter school – or resign.

4. Any school can convert if one individual teams up with a sponsor to apply. This would then force all staff and students into a challenging situation of choosing to leave or stay - even more problematic in smaller regions.

5. The proposal eliminates teachers’ employment protections

6. The proposal remove unions’ ability to initiate for multi-employer collective agreements, breaching international law.

Alarmingly, the over-riding theme for private schools under Seymour is no-transparency and little to no oversight. This includes,

7. Limited financial accountability and transparency of taxpayer dollars. Seymour specifically and personally rejected Ministry of Education advice that private charter schools provide financial statements on a quarterly basis.

8. Disallows external regulation and oversight. Seymour personally rejected the proposal that the Education Review Office could recommend intervention if there were reasonable grounds to believe a charter school had breached their legal or contractual requirements (!)

9. Exclude charter schools and sponsors from the OIA process. All public schools are subject to OIA, and all seeing transparency for obvious reasons, yet Seymour is trying to shield and protect the seeds of privatising the NZ school system under cover of darkness.

We should be alarmed, but of course, there is too much happening and the technical details and boring, plaid names like “Education and Training Amendment Bill” just doesn’t illicit the same understanding or connections.