Q&A: The big fail - how do we fix New Zealand’s broken education system? Dr Nina Hood and Amy Wiggins answer your questions

A 2020 Unicef report found a third of New Zealand 15-year-olds didn't have basic proficiency in literacy and maths. Photo / Scott Webb, Unsplash

If you’ve been reading reporter Amy Wiggins’ new series about New Zealand’s education system, you’ll be familiar with this grim statistic: a third of our 15-year-olds don’t have basic proficiency in literacy and maths.

That’s according to a 2020 Unicef report, but there’s plenty of evidence to suggest things haven’t improved since.

Last year, when the Ministry of Education ran a small pilot of its new NCEA Level 1 literacy and numeracy standards, only one in three students passed the writing component, while around two-thirds passed reading and numeracy tests.

Studies carried out by local non-profit The Education Hub and think-tank The New Zealand Initiative confirm the trend.

Universities have been feeling the downstream effects for more than a decade, with new students struggling to write essays and solve basic equations.

Business leaders, too, have been voicing their concerns for some time. In the Herald’s New NZ series last November, independent economist Cameron Bagrie picked education as the country’s most pressing social and economic problem.

Education Hub founder Dr Nina Hood has seen the issues from the front lines - as a teacher - and as a researcher, advocate and senior lecturer at the University of Auckland (you can read Dr Hood’s 2022 report on literacy, Now I don’t know my ABC, here).

We asked Dr Hood and education reporter Amy Wiggins to talk about what’s gone wrong, why, and where we go from here in a live online discussion with our readers this morning.

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