Early+Childhood+Education

Those of us who work in Pasefika Bilingual units have our own stories to tell. Many of us are forced to test our children using the English National Standards and then our children are benchmarked against English only programmes. How can you benchmark an immersion language child learning to read in Samoan or Tongan against literacy goals and standards in English which they have not yet begun to use? This is what is happening here in New Zealand(See national Standards paper on this site).

Look also at what is happening in Early childhood education. This is the foundation for our children. Cuts have been made here.Only 80% of ECE teachers need to have a teaching qualification now so Govt has withdrawn the funding if you have over 80% registered teachers. Govt insisted that our Early Childhood teachers become registered in order to gain funding. Our teachers did that. They worked hard and tripled their numbers. So what did the new National Govt do- cut their funding. Tell them they no longer needed to be so highly qualified.


 * Table 4: Registered early childhood service teachers**
 * ~ Year ||||||~ Number of registered ECE teachers ||||||~ Number of non-registered ECE teachers ||||||~ Percentage of registered ECE teachers ||
 * ~  ||~ Pasifika ||~ Non-Pasifika ||~ Total ||~ Pasifika ||~ Non-Pasifika ||~ Total ||~ Pasifika ||~ Non-Pasifika ||~ Total ||
 * 2002 || 167 || 4,075 || 4,242 || 776 || 7,219 || 7,995 || 17.7 || 36.1 || 34.7 ||
 * 2003 || 187 || 4,357 || 4,544 || 876 || 7,617 || 8,493 || 17.6 || 36.4 || 34.9 ||
 * 2004 || 208 || 4,832 || 5,040 || 920 || 7,545 || 8,465 || 18.4 || 39.0 || 37.3 ||
 * 2005 || 425 || 6,734 || 7,159 || 734 || 5,877 || 6,611 || 36.7 || 53.4 || 52.0 ||
 * 2006 || 539 || 7,552 || 8,091 || 690 || 5,572 || 6,262 || 43.9 || 57.5 || 56.4 ||
 * 2007 || 631 || 8,443 || 9,074 || 607 || 5,511 || 6,118 || 51.0 || 60.5 || 59.7 ||
 * 2008 || 808 || 9,512 || 10,320 || 669 || 5,872 || 6,541 || 54.7 || 61.8 || 61.2 ||
 * 2009 || 919 || 10,854 || 11,773 || 620 || 6,004 || 6,624 || 59.7 || 64.4 || 64.0 ||
 * 2010 ||  ||   ||   ||   ||   ||   ||   ||   ||   ||
 * 2011 ||  ||   ||   ||   ||   ||   ||   ||   ||   ||
 * 2012 ||  ||   ||   ||   ||   ||   ||   ||   ||   ||
 * Target || 1,208 ||  ||   ||   ||   ||   || >44% ||   ||   ||