Well knock me down with a feather! In another incomprehensible rush of blood to the head the Deputy Prime-Minister David Seymour has written to all the Mayors across the land exhorting them to get involved to encourage kids not to wag school. What does he think they can possibly do? ASK NICELY? To be fair, he did list “four things you can do to help”.
The first was to look at the “dashboard” to compare regions, – quite a good idea in case in some areas there is no problem at all and Mayors going off half-cocked to fix a problem that doesn’t exist would not be a good look.
Secondly, he suggests leading a conversation in the community – “even small steps like encouraging local businesses to be aware that school-aged children should be at school during school hours”, and thirdly “amplifying” the message. I’m not sure what David Seymour thinks Mayors do on a daily basis and I’m not sure how kindly the current crop of Mayors will take to being taught how to suck eggs by someone with the creds Seymour has managed to amass in the education space thus far. I am sure many Mayors are being reminded as we speak about the experiences local businesses have had encouraging kids who should be in school to get back there – and it won’t be pretty…
Fourthly he asks that Mayors should give feedback on what was and was not working. Mayors have been doing that to central government since time immemorial on subjects about which they are far better informed than wagging – and so far, much of it has fallen on deaf ears. What makes David Seymour think it will be any different this time round?
This coalition government got off to a cracking start by taking several nasty and ill-informed pot shots at Local Government – the general tenor being that Local Government is ill disciplined and needs to stick to its knitting. Being roped into becoming part of the solution for kids not attending school is not what Local Government sticking to its knitting looks like. Further, expecting Local Government to find the resources and do the planning to affect a useful rather than a knee jerk response in the middle of a financial year amounts to exhorting the sector to be just as ill-disciplined as they have been previously accused. This would not be the first time central government has off-loaded a problem that is too hard to Local Government.
I do hope that Seymour has sent similar missives to all school boards of Trustees and their Principals. I hope also he is working with the ministry encouraging them to work out why kids are choosing not to attend school – and perhaps even to identify strategies to prevent the problem occurring in the first place. Such strategies might also require that more than one ministry needs to work collaboratively. Some encouragement and expected accountability in that space seems to me to be a much more pragmatic approach than to simply offload another problem not of their making onto the country’s Mayors.