School daze

The new government plans sweeping changes in a bid to drag us back to where we used to be - near the top of educational league tables.

- DANYL MCLAUCHLAN

In leafy Karori, high in the hills above Wellington, sits a cluster of derelict buildings surrounded by construction fences and razor wire. This was once a modern, architectural award-winning campus built in the 1960s when the old Wellington Teachers’ Training College, founded in the 1880s, relocated from Kelburn. It was one of the largest education colleges in the country, from which tens of thousands of teachers graduated over the decades.

In 2005, the college was merged with Victoria University of Wellington, which paid the government a nominal fee of $10 for the campus and subsequently sold it to Ryman Healthcare for $28 million. Victoria shifted teacher training to its Kelburn campus, downsizing it along the way.

Last year, the education faculty was nearly closed until a last-minute cash injection from the government kept it alive. But its former classrooms in Karori are piles of rubble overrun with weeds; the remaining buildings hollowed out, the windows shattered, walls covered in graffiti.

In 2004, graduates from the old college would teach in one of the finest public school systems in the world. The second round of Pisa rankings - the Programme for International Student Assessment, an OECD study comparing education systems across developed and developing nations - released in 2004 scored New Zealand students fifth in the developed world at reading and 11th in mathematics. The subsequent science study ranked New Zealand seventh highest.

The pay was good: teacher salaries declined during the 1990s, leading to staff shortages, but the Clark government agreed to a series of pay rounds and by the mid-2000s they were 1.6 times higher than the average wage.