As discussion about Government’s education reforms gathers pace, it is worth looking at two areas that were omitted in the review, perhaps deliberately.

One was the role of parents in public education. The other concerns discipline.

It may be that parents were left out because poor parenting and the broken families have become an excuse for education officials. If there is a presumption it is that parenting will never improve, and therefore positive change in education is a waste of time.

Many educators now take the view that this can no longer be allowed to be an excuse. Teachers have to get on with the job, and cannot wait for the day that parenting improves.

This is the right approach, but parents still need to take a deeper interest in their children’s education. If schools are setting expectations too low, it is up to parents to demand better of their teachers. If children are being sent home with no homework or a couple of handouts to fill in, then the parents should be demanding more.

At the same time, parents need to give teachers the right to discipline their children. Too often, teachers complain that when they do take action against badly behaved children, the parents are at their door complaining and automatically taking their children’s side before they have found out all the facts.

Parents need to have trust in their children’s teachers that they are not being arbitrary or picking on a particular child. To be sure, there will be the rare teacher who takes a sadistic pleasure in tormenting an individual child. But this is rare, and it is up to school principals to ensure this does not happen.

But the parents who automatically assume their children are telling the truth and attacks — literally or figuratively — a teacher, are not just undermining the teacher, they are creating spoilt and undisciplined adults.

Of course, parental involvement does not merely concern discipline. It would be nice to think that parents were naturally involved in their children’s schools, but this is not the case. They must be given incentives to take part: to attend their children’s classes; to take an active role in PTAs and to be able to take time from work to see what their children are doing.

At the same time, the current code of conduct in the school system is exactly the kind of bureaucratic labyrinth that has given the Ministry of Education such a bad name.

Justice under this code is neither swift nor fair. It takes so long for any kind of meaningful discipline to be administered that it is no surprise that teachers often find themselves facing out of control classrooms. Children are experts at testing limits, and when they find there are none, then they run amok.

Almost all child psychologists know that children crave regular schedules and predictable outcomes. But more often than not, these are missing in the system.

The new education authority needs to create a clearly understood, simple and age appropriate code of conduct for the schools, in which a certain amount of discretion is given to principals. And it needs to find ways to get parents involved in their children’s education in a positive and meaningful way.