Let Parents Choose: Why Families Should have Freedom and Choice in their Children's Education is a book written by Deborah Coddington the former MP for the ACT party. This book is based on ten weeks of research she performed into educational policies and their potential benefit, or cost, for youth. Being of our most extremely right wing political party one would expect me to find this book nefarious.

However I found that the books raises a lot of reasonable points. Key points which I was quite favourable towards include minimizing school sizes. Coddington argues that research indicates that it is the total school size which impacts the learning potential of students, moreso than the class sizes, therefore school sizes should ideally be about 275 - 300 students. Involvement of families is also another issue addressed. Here pointing to trials with tutors to help parents become better equipped to engage with their children's education is shown to reflect positively in academic attainment. She also raises questions about the responsiveness of centrally planned curricula. These points I have mentioned are all ones which I respond more positively too. However it is unfortunate that she does not stop here. As is sometimes typical of ACT she confuses equality of opportunity for equality of results. Certain features she tries to pass off as being equality of result matters (i.e class advantage). On a similar note she is also unusually in opposition to consciousness raising education such as sexism and racism. It strikes me as particularly ironic to simultaneously be basing your policy around notions of choice without providing students with the theoretical tools to overcome barriers such as class, gender or cultural disadvantage. This is not a trivial point as research into these areas demonstrates such barriers have immense implications!

She is also quite quick to throw NCEA (National Certificate of Educational Achievement) under the bus as being "too subjective". Now this puzzled me, as she critiques it as having the audacity to have internally assessed components. I in contrast see it as being quite promising for a further decentralizing of the curricula. It also manages to meet the criteria of having a sufficient nationwide standard, a point both her and I agree is needed.