Student mental health, classroom behaviour and attendance are all poor, while teachers are overworked and leaving the profession.
A new report says society has experienced huge changes but the school system has not moved with the times.
Students and teachers are finding it increasingly hard to stay afloat in a school system that has changed little in decades, while communities have undergone seismic shifts.
This is the conundrum at the heart of a new report, Searching for Utopia, published today by Sir Peter Gluckman‘sthink-tank Koi Tū: The Centre for Informed Futures.
It does not mean schools can’t do very well, as some do, or that the Government’s current policies won’t improve matters, which they might.
But the paper argues for a major overhaul because society has changed so much that the school system no longer prepares young people for adult life in the way it used to.
“Schools are being asked to educate our young people for a more complex and uncertain world, and they are increasingly the primary point of intervention for the growing challenges facing young people in society,” the paper says.
“Yet they are doing this with largely the same infrastructure they had 50 and in some cases 100 years ago. If we want all schools to fulfil their purpose of preparing young people for fulfilling and successful future lives, it is essential that we question whether their underpinning structures facilitate this.”
New Zealand is a much more multicultural society than it was 30 years ago, with greater income inequality and more prevalence of technology
How have we changed?
The traditional family of a heterosexual married couple and children is no longer the norm, with increasingly diversity of “ethnicity, culture, gender identities, religion, values, languages spoken, ages, sexual orientation, and family structure“, the paper says.
A 2021 paper showed 40% of 15-year-olds had spent their childhood with both parents in the same house, while the typical child’s household moved two and half times during that period.
“From 1990 to 2010, New Zealand experienced increasing economic inequality, which resulted in higher rates of poverty, food insecurity, inadequate housing, domestic violence, child mortality and youth suicide,” the paper says.
“Poverty decreases a child’s readiness for school, with research finding that on average, children from low socioeconomic backgrounds have poorer communication skills and more limited vocabularies, weaker social skills and executive functioning skills, and poorer knowledge of numbers, copying and symbol use.”
The paper also notes research about technology’s “largely negative impact” on the wellbeing of children and young people.
“Device use, and in particular social media, is having a substantial impact on the mental health and wellbeing of young people and is shifting the ways they spend their time.
“Schools are increasingly confronted with the need to provide additional support to their students ... This is putting additional strain on teachers and schools, which are not resourced or in many cases qualified to be providing the level of support required.”
National assessment of Year 8 students shows 47% are at or below curriculum level for reading, while for maths it’s 22%.
And while the Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa) shows 15-year-olds in New Zealand above the OECD average for reading, mathematics and science, there have been significant performance drops.
“In mathematics, the proportion of students achieving below NCEA Level 2 (considered by the OECD to be a baseline level of proficiency) increased significantly from 15% in 2003 to 29% in 2022,” the paper says.
High achievers are becoming fewer. The proportion in the upper tier of maths performance more than halved (21% to 10%) from 2003 to 2022, while for reading it fell from 19% to 13% from 2000 to 2022.
“In all assessments, children from low-socioeconomic households, and Māori and Pasifika students, perform on average significantly below their high-socioeconomic, and Pakeha and Asian peers respectively."
It’s only partly about what happens in school, though. One expert analysis in the US found 60% of the variance in student achievement was due to what happens outside school.
“Any reforms attempting to improve school achievement and reduce inequities must not only focus on educational policies but must also include economic and social reforms,” the paper says.
The paper's co-author Dr Nina Hood says there are complex and multiple factors that contribute to the quality of education. Photo / Supplied
How are the two related?
To what extent is poor student achievement the result of the school system failing to keep up with the times? Might they have simply happened side by side?
“We don’t know for sure,” says the paper’s co-author Dr Nina Hood, an honorary senior research fellow at Koi Tū and the academic director at The Teachers' Institute.
“My guess is that there are multiple interconnections between all of them. You can never just look at an educational phenomenon in isolation.”
It would be “much harder” to work out exactly how much each factor — greater cultural diversity, for example — impacts academic performance, in relation to the structure of the school system.
“And it’s actually not that important to find that out,” Hood says. “What’s most important is to be able to think about the range of different factors that are impacting our education system, rather than trying to unpack definitively why or how different things are happening.”
Nor would it all be fixed by, for example, catering to increasing diversity by making it compulsory for schools to foster each student’s cultural identity.
“I would argue it already is [compulsory], and some schools are absolutely doing some tremendous work. The bigger point is that that alone is not enough.”
Sixty-eight per cent of secondary school students feel a sense of belonging (below the OECD average of 75%), while 21% reported feeling lonely at school, and 22% felt like an outsider or were left out of things at school. That sense of belonging and social connection in a school context, Hood says, “is absolutely fundamental to supporting engagement and ongoing learning”.
Should a holistic education system that includes looking after student well-being be an integral part of the school system?
Some schools offer forms of pastoral care, but it’s arguable this shouldn’t be a school’s role, nor should catering to children in sole-parent homes, in poverty, or suffering from depression or anxiety. Schools should be teaching maths, reading and writing, rather than be focused on emotional and holistic development.
“Maths and literacy are all critically important. And if someone says, ‘Well, that’s not the role of schools,’ I say ‘absolutely.’ In our current setup, that is not the role of schools,” Hood says.
“My argument — maybe a little bit nuanced — is that we need to think about whether it should be the role of schools. We want to develop young people who are going to flourish and thrive into their adult lives. We need to think about how we set them up for that kind of success. Is there a broader function that schools need to play?”
One idea in her paper is a community hub, connecting schools with “a broader range of social services, multigenerational support and population health services”. This has been talked about in New Zealand and tried overseas, but not for long enough for there to be any meaningful long-term evaluation.
Hood is also realistic in terms of how much more resource-intensive such a model would be, in the context of a cash-strapped Government that already has policies to tackle truancy, and bring schools “back to basics” with structured literacy and a new maths curriculum.
The three-year election cycle also lends itself to an absence of long-term political commitment.
“I wouldn’t argue that I have all the answers,” Hood adds. “Far from it. But I think we need to start having a serious conversation about it.”
A second paper looking at solutions is due early next year.
A spike in school truancy last year is being blamed on Covid restrictions and their longer-term impacts. Photo / 123rf
The kids aren’t all right. Nor are teachers.
The paper looks beyond the state of student achievement at other struggles among students and teachers. It pulls together different research on the mental health of young people:
The most recent Pisa study said 23% of students were unsatisfied with their lives, putting New Zealand 67th out of 73 participating countries.
An overwhelming majority of secondary school teachers (82%) say mental health issues are occurring more often than two to three years ago.
There’s also been a surge in poor student behaviour. A teachers' survey found 61% of secondary teachers reported serious disruption “often or sometimes” due to such behaviour in 2019, up from 48% in 2015.
This aligns with an Education Review Office (ERO) finding that almost half of teachers were spending at least 40–50 minutes each day dealing with “challenging behaviour”.
There there’s the truancy crisis, which was building before the pandemic. In 2019, only 57.7% of students attended school regularly (classified as 90% of the time). This dropped to 38.9% in 2022 before rising to 48.8% in 2023.
“A third of students do not think that going to school every day is that important, and 22% do not think that school is important for their future,” the paper says, citing ERO data. This might be a reflection of parents: two in three parents would keep their children home for a family, cultural or special event, while 35% would take their children out of school for a holiday of a week or more.
Overstretched teachers are increasingly the crucial intervention points in students' lives, but are not equipped for it
Teachers have responded by leaving the profession.Particular shortages exist in mathematics, physics, chemistry, technology and Te Reo Māori.
“A recent survey of New Zealand secondary school teachers found morale among teachers lower than any time in the previous decade, with only 45% of teachers reporting their morale as good or very good, and 23% as poor or very poor,” the paper says. More than a quarter said their workload was so high they could not do justice to all their students.
For primary school teachers, more than half said their workload was unfair or unmanageable.
The who, what, why of education
“There is growing recognition in some quarters that a one-size-fits-all model of schooling does not adequately or effectively cater for the diversity of students and students’ needs,” the paper says.
It questions whether a traditional classroom system is fit for purpose, given how not every child in the same age group is at the same developmental phase, nor do they progress at the same rate in each subject. The school calendar should also be up for debate, given research suggesting a loss of learning following an extended summer break.
Should schools be part of a broader 'communty hub' model where a more holistic approach can be used, while still retaining the crucial elements of student learning?
Other questions include what resources a school would need to offer holistic support, while also giving teachers the space and time they need to focus on teaching the curriculum effectively.
“We will do our children and young people a substantial disservice if we continue to conceptualise schools only in the same ways that we have over the past generations,” the paper says.
“And our society will be poorer both socially and economically if we continue just to tinker.”
Derek Cheng is a senior journalist who started at the Herald in 2004. He has worked several stints in the press gallery team and is a former deputy political editor.
