By Gerald Piddock

Copyright farmersweekly

Reading Time: 2 minutes

A senior educator has warned that the government’s decision to remove agriculture as a subject in the high school curriculum will jeopardise its goal of wanting to double the value of exports by 2034.

“If we are going to take it out of school, we might as well kiss that goodbye,” Napier Boys High School head of agriculture Rex Newman said.

He believes it shows that the Education Ministry has not fully thought through the implications of the decision, announced by Education Minister Erica Stanford on September 11.

Stanford announced new curriculum subjects for years 11-13 with agriculture and horticulture removed as subjects and instead made industry-led vocational subjects, with agribusiness folded into business studies.

Newman was about to begin his first lesson of the day in his senior ag class when his phone alerted him to the decision.

He immediately began mobilising to make parents and industry supporters aware of what had happened.

“We were blindsided. There was no consultation and there was no awareness that this was going to be a case for us,” he said.

While industry-led education has its place, the changes mean students will have to change out of their academic programme because the subjects that they wanted to take to prepare them for university will no longer be there.

“Basically, we lose a subject area overnight.”

Napier Boys High School has been running agricultural classes since 1872 when the school was founded and the subject is “in its DNA”, he said.

“Up until the announcement, we had never been stronger.”

It runs both an academic and practical agricultural and horticultural programme with more than 300 students coming into contact with it in some form from Year 9 juniors to Year 11 students taking it as a Level 1 NCEA subject.

This year the school has two “fairly full” Level 3 academic classes as well as practical classes, he said.

The current model has a good flow for preparing students to study agriculture at universities and other tertiary institutions across New Zealand.

He predicted the changes would lead to at least 80% of his students no longer taking ag-related subjects.

While industry-led, skills-based subjects are good for some, many of his students already have those skills because they were taught by their parents while helping out on the farm.

“For a lot of these kids, they have been doing practical skills since they were three or four years old, sitting in the truck with Mum and Dad.”

Agriculture is also unique because it incorporates parts of so many other subjects, such as science, economics, geography, accountancy and business.

“We are going to lose that if we go into the vocational side because there’s no incentive for anyone to teach it.”

Stanford has been contacted for comment.