| Thursday, May 17, 2012 6:00 AM

It was ten years before the most radical education reforms God's Own has seen in decades, and in fact who knows, the theme song to Pink Floyd's rock opera may have spurred Big Dave Lange into action?

The chorus was enough: we don't need no education, we don't need no thought control, no dark sarcasm in the classroom. Teachers, leave those kids alone, hey teachers, leave those kids alone!

Well Big Dave was having none of it, on taking over the reigns of power just five years after the Pink Floyd hit, he named himself Minister of Education, the highest ranked portfolio in his Government. Over the next four years he developed a plan called Tomorrow's Schools.

The Education Department, education boards and school committees were scrapped and replaced with an autonomous Ministry of Education, the Education Review Office and boards of trustees to govern each school. It was the board's job to employ staff and to manage an annual budget.

Naturally enough it was greeted with the naysayers, it was the end of the education system as we knew it. Well the system's essentially still in place today, but now it's being kicked into the new millennium.

The argument of successive Governments that fewer pupils means better teaching, has been lost on the new education supremo, the Tory's bright spark Hekia Parata, or Lady Gardiner as she's known in more posh circles and that's got nothing to with the vege patch. Her argument is that it's the quality of teacher that counts and not the head count in the classroom.

So under her grand plan teachers will be paid on performance which presumably means results. She unveiled it in front of a well-heeled business breakfast in the Capital, where they reputedly paid a couple of hundred bucks a plate and would obviously agree with her sentiment that education's a passport to a better life, learning is earning, she told them.

Whether she's on the right track won't really be known until she and her Cabinet cobbers have hopefully earned their keep and are on the old age pension!

Photo: Edward Swift