We owe our kids an apology.

School students of all ages in this country have been used as guinea pigs in failed experiments that have been demonstrably bad for their learning.

We've had two announcements from the Government this week that prove this.

First, the latest NCEA maths results from low decile schools. They improved by around 70 percent. 19.8 percent passed the co-requisite test last year. In June it was 34 percent.

This is, obviously, excellent news. Well done to those students for putting in the hard work.

The begging question is why and how on earth did this happen? I asked both Erica Stanford and Chris Hipkins, the former Education Minister, this question.

Both agreed it was a more relentless focus on the basics. Both agreed that teachers have been teaching too much 'fluffy' other stuff to students and their results in core subjects have been declining as a result.

Both politicians blamed the other party for changing where the focus goes.

And that's politics. But it's the students who've missed out. They're the ones who won't get those years back. They're the ones who've missed out. They're the ones who will pay the price in future for missing out on a basic education.

And two, the open plan, barn-yard style classrooms - the home of distracted learning.

The Government today announced they won't build any new ones. Which, again, is welcome news. But the question is - why any were built in the first place?

The Key government built some and Labour carried on.

All of this on the advice of boffins at the Ministry of Education who've clearly never stepped foot in an actual classroom. Now, the Minister says they've done some actual research and realised they're a terrible idea.

This is how Erica Stanford politely described how schools are coping with these classes at present:

"There are schools who still have them and they operate in them the best they possibly can. They have trained their teachers to work in them, they've got really good acoustics. They're teaching children at different levels, some on chairs, some on the floor to reduce the noise, and they're doing the best they can."

I know, totally ridiculous.

The reality is, we can't solely blame out kids for their failure to learn.

We can also blame ill-informed or ideologically-driven experiments by the Ministry of Education, the unions and politicians.

Whether it's the Ministry in Wellington, the unions or politicians, we can't solely blame our kids for their failure to learn.

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