Talk to a teacher at a state school and most will tell you competition is a dirty word. When it comes to relationships between schools, cooperation rules.
 
Schools do not even compete for pupils. Instead, students are allocated according to where they live.
 
School zoning is such an institution that this might not seem odd. But imagine for a moment that the Government introduced laws applying zoning to a field other than schooling, say, to supermarkets.
 
Under a (hypothetical) Supermarkets Zoning Act, customers would be allocated to a local Foodstuffs or Countdown store based on where they lived. Individual stores would be required to turn away any customers looking to take advantage of a better offering at an out-of-zone store.
 
The zoning would apply only to 5 to 18-year-old customers. There would be exceptions for preschoolers, whose parents could shop for them wherever they liked.
 
University-eligible customers would also be allowed to shop in any zone. Indeed, the competition for university-aged customers might be so fierce that one of the Otago-based stores might sponsor a Super Rugby franchise to attract out of zone customers (as the University of Otago does).
 
And some customers might be lucky enough to win a ballot to shop out-of-zone at Sylvia Park.
 
Of course, that would not be the end to the absence of in-zone competition. Supermarkets in one zone would not be allowed to poach staff from competing supermarkets in other zones with offers of higher pay.
 
Nor would competition among supermarket staff-members be rewarded. Supermarkets would be prohibited from paying any individual staff member more than any other staff member with the same level of experience doing the same job.
 
Do we have any doubt what the outcome of this would be on supermarket service or supermarket prices?
 
There may be the odd person in other professions who is envious of the teaching profession’s lack of competition. After all, competition can be tough.
 
But there are laws to stop other professions “cooperating” rather than competing. Indeed, in the business world it is called collusion, and there is a dedicated police force at the Commerce Commission to prevent it. The reason is that we know competition improves quality and lowers prices.
 
As we struggle to improve the educational outcomes for our least-well-off, maybe our schools could learn to compete a little more.