Laura Trask MP was born and raised in Christchurch and has held roles on boards, owned a small business, and been a coach and a manager. Laura began her career in pharmacy before building a market-leading evacuation consultancy business with her factory. Laura was elected to Parliament as an ACT Party MP in 2023 but, in her spare time, you’ll find her on the side-line cheering for her two kids or exploring New Zealand’s backyard.

“We need to get the politics and bureaucracy out of New Zealand’s education system, bring high standards for attendance and learning in, and treat the profession with respect. While Labour is responsible for lowering the bar and leaving kids even further behind their international peers, the education decline started well before 2017,” says ACT Leader David Seymour.

ACT will:

• Use information on school attendance and educational progress to prioritise ERO school inspections.
• Ensure ERO’s school evaluation reports are consistent and based on clear, objective, and relevant criteria.
• Improve the Ministry of Education’s slow and ineffective approach to managing under-performance by enforcing a clear and structured intervention process for identifying and intervening in under-performing schools.
• Replace the current practice of appointing a limited statutory manager or commissioner to a struggling school. A tendering process would enable existing school operators to apply to take over schools that fail. Applications would consider the school operator’s track record of success. Where there is more than one school operator interested in the takeover, the Ministry would be responsible for selecting the best candidate based on who would best serve the school community.
• Evaluate the outcomes of school interventions, as persistent failure is likely to indicate system-wide weaknesses in the education system.

ACT will:

• Develop a traffic light system for unjustified absences, which will be publicly available in real-time.
• Redirect funding from centrally controlled truancy services so schools can fund or purchase services directly.
• Extend the B4 School Check to include education progress as well as health. ECE providers that fail to contribute to child development may risk losing their funding or license.
• Set minimum criteria that any curriculum taught in New Zealand primary schools must follow, but allow for multiple curriculum versions.
• Ensure all schools participate in standardised testing.
• Develop an online league table, like Australia’s ‘My School’, to help parents understand how their school is performing compared with other schools.
• Refuse to lower the bar for literacy and numeracy standards. ACT will conduct another set of mock exams in 2024 to gauge progress on higher literacy and numeracy standards and commit to enforcing higher standards from 2025.
• Abolish University Entrance as a separate qualification and replace NCEA level three requirements with the current University Entrance requirements.
• Ensure employers’ and tertiary institutions’ input is included in the development of achievement and unit standards.

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