Government bill prevents schools from opting out of international maths, reading tests

Education Minister Erica Stanford unveils education reforms to speed up action on failing schools. Photo / Mark Mitchell

By John Gerritsen of RNZ

A Government bill will stop schools opting out of international maths and reading tests and speed up intervention in failing schools.

It will also give a new property agency the power to force schools to spend money on building works.

The Education and Training (System Reform) Bill was introduced to Parliament this week.

Education Minister Erica Stanford said the bill would ensure the education system supported the Government’s priorities.

She said a key aspect was raising the quality of initial teacher education.

That part of the bill would enable changes to the Teaching Council announced earlier in the month.

They included shifting the council’s responsibility for teacher education and teachers’ professional standards to the Education Ministry, and changing the make-up of its governing body to include only three representatives elected by teachers and four to six ministerial appointees.

The bill would require the Education Review Office to notify the ministry and minister within two working days if it decided a school “may be of serious concern”, followed within 28 working days by a report and recommended statutory interventions.

It would establish a new Crown agency, the New Zealand School Property Agency, to manage school property.

The agency’s powers would include recovering costs for maintenance and repairs, and requiring boards to take action.

The bill would require the Education Ministry to review curriculum areas on a rolling basis and allow different curriculum statements to be made for different groups of schools.

It would remove the requirement for school boards to consult their communities about the health curriculum – something the Education Review Office recommended last year.

The bill would remove the ability of state, charter and private schools to opt out of studies such as the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment – a change apparently responding to a high refusal rate in the 2022 tests.

The Educational Institute, Te Riu Roa, warned the bill was a bulldozer that significantly increased ministerial control over the school system.

It said the bill would politicise education.

“What we are seeing is what we’ve seen in the curriculum changes – a Government hell-bent on making a one-size-fits-all education system and controlling it in its entirety, without thought for the diversity and needs of our tamariki and our communities. We cannot see in any of the proposed changes a world where tamariki, kaiako or their whānau will be better off,” it said.

The bill would also give the Education Minister the power to amend the school curriculum even if the ministry had not reviewed it.

It said the minister should first have regard to any report from the ministry, information about student achievement, and other evidence including research and international practice.

The Post Primary Teachers Association said the proposed change was “a radical departure from decades of collaborative curriculum development”.

“We’ve always relied on robust consultation, expert input and structured review processes. This bill undermines those safeguards and concentrates power in a way that is deeply concerning,” it said.

-RNZ