I am more than puzzled with the present situation on vaping and the proven harm it is doing to our young people and my experience in trying to find solutions.
I have a grandchild who is a year 10 pupil. I am going to keep their name and area in which they live private for reasons which will become obvious. When talking to my grandchild recently I naturally asked how school was going.
I was appalled by the reply.
Learning was really difficult because fellow pupils were openly vaping in the classroom as well as watching movies on their smartphones. No attention was being paid to the teacher and attempts to control this behaviour were met with abuse.
My response was to write to the Prime Minister, Chris Hipkins, to outline my concerns and to clarify exactly what the law and rules were around the use of vaping products in classrooms. As readers will recall, Mr Hipkins was, for many years, the Minister of Education. His answer was that my letter was going to be referred to the present minister, Jan Tinetti as he no longer was responsible for the ministry.
It took some time for her office to respond and it was clear that there were numerous people in her office who weren’t communicating with each other, but eventually I got a response to say that the use of tobacco and vaping products on school grounds was illegal, but it was up to each school’s governance and management to work out how, or it appears, if, the law or regulation was to be enforced.
The recommendation was to raise the matter with the school directly which, of course, immediately opens the probability of bullying when the identity of the complainant becomes obvious. As it happens, this happened to some extent because of the process that was followed by the school. The inevitable end result was that my grandchild enrolled at another school which appears to have less trouble in enforcing the current laws and regulations.
There the matter could have ended, but recently when the National Party announced that it wanted to introduce stricter controls around the use of phones in schools, reaction was sought by media from those running schools.
Vaughan Couillault, from the Post Primary Teachers’ Association, responded by saying that politicians should instead be concentrating on the control of vaping products because they were "killing our kids".
He is right, but what he failed to do was to tell us that apparently it is up to each school to choose to enforce what the law or regulations demand. Each school can apparently choose to either ignore the law or enforce it.
Is this not simply shambolic?
And is it not recognising that the schools are not enforcing a law that already exists?
I don’t think any thinking person believes that the promotion of and sale of vaping products to children is a good thing. But if there is a law that says that these products are not allowed to be present on school grounds, then either the Ministry of Education and/or every school must enforce that law.
Vaping is but one strand of the complex problem of rapidly falling standards in our schools.I don’t believe for one instant that a soft response to vaping and the use of phones for entertainment while in class is the answer. Australia certainly seems to have taken a much stricter view of vaping than New Zealand.
I sense that many in the teaching profession are unhappy with parental or societal demands for a greater concentration on the core education subjects and questions must be asked whether that pushback is because some teachers — particularly in the primary area — are themselves not confident with those core subjects. That will take time to solve if that is the case.
Until then, I believe it is incumbent on the teaching profession to support any move to ensure that tobacco and vape products are not tolerated and that unnecessary distractions like smartphones are not allowed to get in the way of a concentrated effort to reverse the current alarming educational standards.
— Russell Garbutt is a concerned grandparent.
