The Role of Research in Educational Planning in New Zealand
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/eb009583 |
| Date | 01 February 1964 |
| Pages | 108-124 |
| Published date | 01 February 1964 |
| Author | JOHN E. WATSON |
| Subject Matter | Education |
108 THE JOURNAL OF EDUCATIONAL ADMINISTRATION
VOLUME II, NUMBER 2 OCTOBER, 1964
The Role of Research in Educational
Planning in New Zealand
JOHN E. WATSON
(Paper presented at a meeting of the International Conference for the Advance-
ment of Educational Research. Bangkok, Dec. 23-28, 1963.)
New Zealand's public school system has more than doubled in
size during the last twenty years. Although it is a national
system, centrally financed (and, only in part, locally admin-
istered), New Zealanders are sceptical about the value of central-
ized planning. Educational planning is in the hands of the
Minister of Education, ad hoc consultative committees or com-
missions, district education boards, school committees and
teachers themselves. The research conducted by these groups is
usually of the fact-collecting variety. That carried out by uni-
versity staff members has tended to be diffuse, fragmented and
discontinuous, most of it being relegated to the farthest recesses
of university libraries. The work of the New Zealand Council for
Educational Research, however, has obviously influenced educa-
tional planning to a considerable extent. There is a growing
conviction in New Zealand that the vitality and enterprise of a
school system depends upon the vigour of its research and experi-
mental programmes.
Within the past twenty years New Zealand has doubled both
the proportion of its national income, and of its gross national
product that is devoted to education. In this same period the
enrolments of its elementary schools have doubled, those of its
secondary schools and teachers' colleges have trebled, its univers-
ities have entered upon a programme of rapid development, and
a start has been made in introducing higher levels of technological
training. Such developments reflect, as they do in other nations, a
remarkable change in demographic circumstances, rising expecta-
tions on the part of both parents and employers, and a wide-
spread acceptance of the ideal of providing equality of educational
opportunity for all. When compared with some nations New
Zealand has, of course, enjoyed certain advantages in coping with
these challenges but this has not spared administrators, teachers
MR. JOHN E. WATSON is Assistant Director of the New Zealand Council
for Educational Research. He has taught in a wide variety of New Zealand
schools and has lectured at the University of Auckland and Michigan State
University. He holds the M.A. degree of the University of Otago and has
pursued post-graduate studies at the University of North Carolina. Mr. Watson
has travelled extensively in Japan and S. E. Asia and has written numerous
journal articles and a book, Intermediate Schooling in New Zealand (1964).
Educational Planning in New Zealand 109
and citizens who share in the organization of its school system
from the need for care and precision in considering priorities to
enable the community to achieve its aspirations.
Any systematic ordering of needs, resources, and objectives into
a plan of administrative actions is almost impracticable, how-
ever, without a wide measure of agreement on basic aims and
values. This is never easy to achieve in a democratic community
or in a flexibly administered school system. If the need and the
opportunity for such planning occurs at a time when values and
aspirations are obscure or uncertain, the results are likely to be
conflicting at best and deluding at worst. Furthermore, uncertainty
about a community's basic values increases the danger, so fearful
to all sensitive planners, that hasty action may cement into the
educational landscape structures which will later curb enterprise
and growth. It is possible indeed for planning to be so rigid and
stereotyped that the very sources of growth in an administrative
system will become parched and exhausted.
By spreading the responsibility for planning very widely, by
involving a diversity of interests and individuals, and by adopt-
ing sectional rather than monolithic planning, it is assumed in
New Zealand that these dangers can at least be lessened if not
entirely avoided. An assumption of this kind presupposes that
a capacity for recognizing basic issues is widespread in the com-
munity and also that the people involved have the relevant body
of knowledge needed to make a choice among the alternatives
available at any given point or time. By good fortune the need for
more skilful planning in New Zealand has occurred at a time
when the wider community has been in a process of acquiring an
increased capacity for critical examination of its own aspirations
and values. Over recent decades a broad process of increasing
intellectual and cultural sophistication has been evident in many
forms and through many different avenues. In providing a climate
for the operation of a democratic system of educational planning
this prerequisite can very easily be overlooked or underestimated.
Both the manner and the means by which research now influ-
ences educational planning in New Zealand, then, are determined
in large part by its past achievements, and the phases of growth
through which its school system has already passed. In contrast
to many newer nations, New Zealand already has a developed
school system from the kindergarten to the university; it has a
large body of trained, responsible and energetic teachers and
administrators, and a large investment in educational plant and
buildings. The school system operates in a community that has
already had the benefit of compulsory education for three genera-
tions with all that this implies in terms of common knowledge,
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