Consultation on the six drafts for Years 0-10 closed at the end of last week. Photo / 123RF
By John Gerritsen of RNZ
Teachers specialising in music, physical education, science, technology and history have slammed draft curriculums covering their subjects.
Submissions provided to RNZ say the music curriculum is unteachable, science is overcrowded and in some cases even silly, while PE needed a total rewrite.
They say combining dance and drama in the arts curriculum was problematic, and technology is confusing and unusable.
Consultation on the six drafts for Years 0-10 closed at the end of last week.
The drafts would replace a curriculum many said was too vague with documents that set out more clearly what teachers must teach at each year level, from the start of primary school through to the first two years of secondary school.
The Government wants to finalise the curriculums later this year, with schools using the new science, social sciences, and health and physical education curriculums next year, and the arts, technology and learning languages from the start of 2028.
Many principals groups said the timeline was unworkable and Education Minister Erica Stanford said she would make announcements on the curriculum soon.
All submissions provided to RNZ highlighted a lack of meaningful Māori content in the drafts.
Drama New Zealand said: “There is very little, if any, indigenous knowledge in ‘performing arts’ and what is there is tokenistic.”
A submission from Bay of Plenty science teachers said the curriculum’s “guiding kaupapa of ‘excellent equitable outcomes, reflecting the Treaty of Waitangi/Te Tiriti o Waitangi’ is not evident anywhere in the science draft”.
The New Zealand History Teachers Association said the social sciences draft breached principles derived from Te Tiriti o Waitangi, while Physical Education NZ said the draft health and physical education curriculum weakened “the bicultural foundations that underpin learning in Aotearoa New Zealand”.
Last week, the Education Ministry said it was finalising the number of submissions received.
Physical Education New Zealand’s submission on the draft health and physical education curriculum said the document needed a total rewrite.
“The current draft curriculum is not fit for purpose,” the submission said. “It does not require refinement, it requires complete reworking.
“Any attempt to adjust or ‘tweak’ the existing draft will result in a curriculum that is incoherent, difficult to implement and ultimately unable to deliver meaningful outcomes for ākonga.
“The issues are not peripheral. They are structural, conceptual and disciplinary.”
It listed problems including a narrow view of PE centred on performance and measurable competencies, a fragmented and underdeveloped approach to knowledge, and lack of coherence as children progressed.
“This submission is intentionally direct, because the stakes are high,” the submission said.
Physical Education New Zealand (Penz) managing director Heemi McDonald told RNZ the draft would take physical education back to the 1950s and 1960s, when the subject was focused on sport.
“It drives physical education back down to a skills-and-drills kind of approach,” he said. “If we look back in our past, like maybe in the 50s and the 60s, the PE curriculum was very much sports skills and drills, and the discipline has moved significantly from that time along with the world.”
McDonald said the subject had moved on significantly, and the draft failed to recognise the importance of learning about movement, identity and relationships through physical education.
For example, he said 5-year-olds needed to understand how they moved, how to work with other people and skills to move through the world.
“At its most basic level, that’s what our curriculum should reflect – this idea that our bodies are moving, we move in the world with others, we move in different environments and we all have a different experience,” he said.
McDonald said sport was good, but the subject was much more than that.
“If I’m teaching a young person to develop a particular movement skill – rolling or throwing or catching – we want them to be able to see that in lots of different contexts because you’re not only going to throw and catch in softball or cricket.”
“If every child has to do netball or has to do hockey or has to do cricket, which is what the draft implies, then who are we missing out, who are the kids who are not going to engage in those things.”
“The risk ... is that we end up as sports coaches as opposed to teachers.”
He said Penz supported a more prescriptive curriculum that made clearer what teachers should teach.
Technology Education New Zealand’s submission said its members raised significant problems with the draft technology curriculum.
“Feedback consistently highlights significant structural, pedagogical, cultural and practical issues that require attention to ensure the curriculum is clear, equitable, implementable and able to meet the needs of all ākonga,” it said.
“A core concern is that the curriculum’s overall purpose feels vague and insufficiently defined. Many teachers report difficulty understanding the intended outcomes, the role of design thinking, and how the learning area supports both practical and academic pathways.
“Confusion is further amplified by inconsistent or unclear use of terminology, uneven expectations across year levels and complexity that escalates sharply between phases. Many describe the structure as poorly sequenced and lacking coherence across Years 1-10.”
The submission said members were also unhappy with the curriculum’s approximate allocation of an hour a week for the subject in Years 0-8 and 1.5 hours a week in Years 9-10.
Association chair Hamish Johnston told RNZ the draft had many big problems.
He said some technology areas had been squished together to make unviable subjects and the curriculum’s recommended time allocation for technology was badly conceived.
At Years 7-10, areas such as textiles, hard materials, food and biotechnology had been combined to a single “Materials and Processing Strand”.
“The classroom spaces where they would be taught, the teacher expertise to teach those things, putting them all in one subject together does not seem viable,” he said.
Johnston said the curriculum expected too much in some areas and recommended far too little time for technology – about 1.5 hours a week.
“The issue with the timing is it reduces certain subjects to an amount of time that would not allow deep and meaningful teaching,” he said.
Johnston said many schools allowed about three hours a week for each of the eight learning areas, but the new curriculums set aside more time for English and maths, and less for other subjects.
He said the sector had put up with about eight years of change and impending change, and it was burning through teachers.
Drama New Zealand’s submission said combining dance and drama as performing arts was “problematic and devalues both disciplines”.
“There is very little, if any, indigenous knowledge in ‘performing arts’ and what is there is tokenistic,” it said.
“The draft curriculum does not reflect research and evidence for sound curriculum design for arts education, especially drama and dance internationally.”
Meanwhile, Music Education New Zealand Aotearoa’s submission said the music part of the curriculum was too focused on formal music lessons, with next-to-no mention of creativity or love of music.
“The draft curriculum, as written, is not deliverable in the majority of primary school contexts, without fundamental changes to resourcing, teacher capability and time allocation,” it said.
Association chair Kat Daniela said the curriculum would worsen existing inequities, because it required trained music teachers and could not be taught by generalist primary teachers.
“We have students who move into secondary school having never had any dedicated curriculum music time and then we have others who have had really rich music experiences,” she said. “Our concern is that the divides that already exist, and that lack of access and equity would be further widened.”
Daniela said the curriculum had to be teachable by regular teachers.
“It has to be available for generalist teachers,” she said. “They have to have the ability to be able to teach, it because we don’t have a huge number of music specialists.”
Daniela said the draft also contained many basic errors, which the association assumed the Education Ministry would fix.
A submission from Bay Science, an organisation for teachers in Bay of Plenty, said a survey indicated 80% of its members believed the draft science curriculum had “far too much content” and 84% wanted significant changes.
Teachers’ notes on the draft said much of the content was too advanced for the age it was aimed at and primary schools did not have the required equipment.
Comments included “way too early for this” and “difficult concept at this level”, while mention of Greek scientist Theophrastus for Year 1 students was labelled “just silly” and “ridiculous”.
The submission said the draft was not internationally comparable, had knowledge gaps and did not honour Te Tiriti o Waitangi.
Intermediate school science specialist John Marsh told RNZ he liked a lot of the content, but worried that it lacked New Zealand flavour and would require a lot of support for teachers.
“I think there’s some really nice pieces in it, but it it does have some flaws,” he said. “The thing I really like about it is very clear principles, theories and exemplars, which I think will be very useful.
“It’s been aligned to the UK and some of the USA curricula, so international curricula, and that’s good and bad. It’s nice to be able to kind of make a connection, but I think we have missed out on making it New Zealand’s curriculum.”
Marsh said, in the past 12 years, New Zealand schools had emphasised the “nature of science”, meaning the skills and approaches scientists used to investigate problems and make observations, but the draft had dropped that completely.
“I think that’s a mistake,” he said.
Marsh said UK and US primary schools tended to employ science specialist teachers, unlike New Zealand, where science specialists were a rarity.
“A lot of overseas programmes are textbook-driven,” he said. “I have taught in textbook systems in Ireland and England, and it was pretty boring.
“I’m not sure if going towards a more book-driven or content knowledge, especially in the primary sector, is going to be as engaging for our kids, because New Zealand kids like doing things, they like pulling stuff apart, observing, discussing amongst themselves and that sort of thing.”
The NZ History Teachers Association’s submission on the draft social sciences curriculum said the document needed significant changes.
“The design, as it stands, will undermine effective teaching and student learning, and substantive revision is required,” it said.
“This draft curriculum is full of distortion and obfuscation that will harm Māori students, and has a eurocentric positionality. So much content is included that the concern is not that New Zealand history is absent from the new curriculum, but that it will be taught in a cursory and monocultural manner, re-inforcing outdated misconceptions and myths.”
The submission said the Government was making too much change too fast.
“The pace of curriculum change is unreasonable, has layered multiple demands on schools and kura, and has created huge workloads on the sector. This will have significant negative impacts, including impacting on the recruitment and retention of teachers.”
The submission said the draft’s teaching of history in a chronological sequence was a mistake.
“The curriculum describes what comes next, but not how learning deepens or what students should be increasingly able to do. This creates a fragmented experience of disconnected topics, rather than a cumulative pathway of understanding.”
It also said the curriculum did not meet the “Science of Learning” principles that supposedly underpinned it.
“The draft references principles aligned with the Science of Learning, but does not enable them in practice. This is a fundamental design flaw.
“Cognitive load is too high: Dense, unprioritised content introduces too many new ideas simultaneously, limiting retention.”