Wednesday, March 14, 2007

Regulatory rubbish

This is a bureaucratic nightmare. A New Plymouth Montessori centre has two licences because it has 100 students and a licence is needed for each 50. So the Ministry of Education has now decided it needs to operate as two centres.

Literally, this will mean the school having to build a fence right down the middle of its property and operate it as two centres. Parents will need to enrol their children in one centre or the other, despite the fact they will be centimetres apart.

Even worse, the children will have to play in separate playgrounds that, once again, will be immediately adjacent to each other on what legally remains the same school property.


Madness.

2 comments:

Rick said...

What do we need an ACT party for again? I can't remember.

Anonymous said...

What the article does not say was that the Ministry of Education approved this Montessori double licence for years. It does not say that the Ministry considers that as the school shares the same playing area, then as there is 100 people in the area, it is overcrowded. The play area is the biggest in the country for a centre of this type and it is never full - so it is not overcrowded.

SO for the ministry to say that it is overcrowded, and say they are right, for the purposes of argument, then to build a fence down the middle covering the same area to cater for the same amount of kids is economic and bureaucratic nonsense.

The real madness is that the Ministry allowed this situation to go on for so long without doing anything about it until it decided to change its mind. Hardly consistant. Thats why Ministry officials are ignoring the media on the issue.

cheers, Dave @ Big News