From the archives: Education Minister Erica Stanford has unveiled a list of six priorities in education, arguing the sector needs “fundamental” change. She told the country: “I’m putting ambition, achievement and outcomes at the heart of our education system,” she said. Earlier this year, Danyl McLauchlan looked at how the new government plans to make our kids top of the class once again. We revisit that article here.
In leafy Karori, high in the hills above Wellington, sits a cluster of derelict buildings surrounded by construction fences and razor wire. This was once a modern, architectural award-winning campus built in the 1960s when the old Wellington Teachers’ Training College, founded in the 1880s, relocated from Kelburn. It was one of the largest education colleges in the country, from which tens of thousands of teachers graduated over the decades.
In 2005, the college was merged with Victoria University of Wellington, which paid the government a nominal fee of $10 for the campus and subsequently sold it to Ryman Healthcare for $28 million. Victoria shifted teacher training to its Kelburn campus, downsizing it along the way.
Last year, the education faculty was nearly closed until a last-minute cash injection from the government kept it alive. But its former classrooms in Karori are piles of rubble overrun with weeds; the remaining buildings hollowed out, the windows shattered, walls covered in graffiti.
In 2004, graduates from the old college would teach in one of the finest public school systems in the world. The second round of Pisa rankings – the Programme for International Student Assessment, an OECD study comparing education systems across developed and developing nations – released in 2004 scored New Zealand students fifth in the developed world at reading and 11th in mathematics. The subsequent science study ranked New Zealand seventh highest.
The pay was good: teacher salaries declined during the 1990s, leading to staff shortages, but the Clark government agreed to a series of pay rounds and by the mid-2000s they were 1.6 times higher than the average wage.
Not everything was perfect – a troubling number of young people left school without any qualifications, a group in which Māori and Pasifika students were over-represented. But the government pledged that its sweeping changes to the education system – the introduction of the National Certificate of Educational Attainment (NCEA), a new national curriculum, and merging the teachers’ colleges with the universities – would address these problems, creating a new, 21st-century system in which all students flourished.
Twenty years later, new teaching graduates enter a system in crisis. There is another staffing shortage: in 2023, some schools in Auckland were forced to ask students to stay home because of lack of staff, and this is expected to worsen this year. New Zealand’s number of teachers per capita across state and integrated schools has declined, slowly and steadily, for two decades.
The Post-Primary Teachers Association (PPTA) estimates that the latest rounds of pay increases will raise salaries to 1.56 times the average wage.
School attendance levels have been trending down since 2011. In term two of that year, 69% of students were present for more than 90% of half-days (they missed less than one full day every two weeks on average). By term two of 2023, that was 47%. This decline occurs across all regions, deciles, genders and ethnicities – although it is worse for Māori and Pasifika students (about a third are attending regularly) and those from low-income households (26% under the old deciles 1-3 categories).
The latest round of Pisa results released in December showed deteriorations across the board. In the past two decades, reading and science performance has slipped by about a year: A 15-year-old in 2023 tests on the same level as a 14-year-old in 2003.
Mathematics has seen a steeper decline, receding by about 11/2 years. From being close to the world’s best 20 years ago, our results are now marginally above the OECD average – although New Zealand’s participation in this round of Pisa was skewed towards high-decile schools, and the Ministry of Education estimates that the current results actually overestimate the true performance of New Zealand students.
It’s not just Pisa. Six large, sample-based studies evaluate the performance of the pre-tertiary education system, from early childhood through to late secondary. All of them show downward trends. In 2022, the ministry ran a pilot of its new NCEA reading and literacy standards: only a third of students passed the writing component. In decile 1 schools – those with students from the lowest socio-economic areas – the pass rate was just 2%.
Something has gone wrong, and some experts are scrutinising the changes made in the early 2000s and suggesting the educational approach they embedded is failing students, turning a once-successful system into a wasteland.
What happened?
Nina Hood never wanted to be an academic. She trained as a secondary school teacher and taught classics and social studies at Auckland’s Epsom Girls and Mt Roskill grammar schools. But her experience in the classroom raised questions about teaching and learning, so she did a master’s degree followed by a PhD at Oxford studying the role of new technologies in learning. When she returned to New Zealand, Hood decided not to go back to the classroom. “That was a really hard decision to make and I missed school-level teaching for a long time.” Instead, she took an academic position at the University of Auckland and founded The Education Hub, an online resource that attempts to bridge the gap between academic research and teachers.
Hood has also emerged as a vocal critic of the current system. This isn’t a wildly popular position in pedagogical circles. “When I say that things have gone wrong, or things aren’t good enough in the education system, there are a number of people who tell me I can’t say that. But the international studies have shown that over the past 10-15 years, there has been a decline and then a stagnation. That’s across reading, maths and science. And if you look at the national monitoring study data – New Zealand-based data; a really excellent dataset – that doesn’t show a big decline.
“But to me it’s irrelevant whether it shows a decline or not because it demonstrates that we’ve got only 20% of Year 8 students at or above the curriculum level in science. That is a problem, whether or not it’s declining. And it doesn’t get much better in other subjects. That is a disgrace.”
She also points out the divergences between different groups of students: low socio-economic versus high socio-economic; Māori and Pasifika versus New Zealand European and Asian. And in a number of subjects, differences between boys and girls. “That paints a horrendous picture in terms of equity of outcome in the education system.”
There’s a sentiment across much of the education sector that the system itself is fine. Yes, there are inequities and failures but it is our society, with its poverty, abuse and inequality, that is failing the students, not the schools. Hood doesn’t entirely disagree with this. “The thing we know about education is that it’s multi-factorial. Social and economic situations that exist outside of school have a huge impact on academic achievement.
“The stability of family life is a huge factor. New Zealand has a transient population at lower income levels. Children are moving schools frequently, and more and more parents are working multiple jobs, so they don’t have that stability or parental presence to support them.”
But we had socio-economic inequality in the early 2000s as well. Most child poverty metrics were significantly worse then than they are today. Some of the decline in student performance, Hood believes, can be attributed to the change in the school curriculum and the philosophy of teaching it embodies.
This will be in the test
The national curriculum sets the content, approach and goals of the education system. Before 2007, it consisted of seven weighty volumes. These were subject focused and highly academic, with great emphasis on English, maths and science. There was little acknowledgement of cultural diversity or special-needs students. Teachers were told what to teach; students were measured against predetermined criteria through the end-of-year exams – School Certificate and University Entrance. When School C was retired, Labour’s minister of education, Steve Maharey – a former Massey University sociologist – dismissed it as the “production-line model of schooling which predominates in the Western world”.
School Certificate was replaced with the NCEA, which uses a mixture of internal and external assessments. Instead of studying mathematics for a year and passing or failing on a single exam result, students could earn unit standards in geometry and statistics, and schools could determine their own approach to teaching and marking.
A new national curriculum complemented this more flexible, modular approach. It was built around the concept of “student-centric learning”. Different students made sense of the world in different ways, so instead of treating them as interchangeable units passively absorbing information, learning would be approached as a personal and individual activity. Instead of knowledge and rote memorisation, children would develop key competencies: thinking; relating to others; using symbols, language and text; managing self; participating and contributing. Teachers could decide on the best way to develop these competencies, based on their students’ needs.
When every day is sports day
How much time do New Zealand school students spend playing sports or watching movies in the classroom? How much work gets done in the final month of the year when the weather is good and the holidays draw near? “I would love to know that,” Hood replies, when asked what percentage of school time consists of sports and games instead of formal teaching. There isn’t any data. “My guess is that it is highly variable. But there are some schools where there is a lack of urgency around actually needing to teach the students something.”
For Hood, this is a consequence of the student-centric approach. It can incentivise teachers and schools to provide short-term enjoyment rather than a longer-term focus on what it means to be educated. The basic problem, she believes, is that there’s now very little knowledge content in the curriculum. This is by design: teachers are empowered to determine lesson content for themselves. But the result is that students across different schools and different classrooms are learning very different things – and in some cases, not learning much at all – leading to wildly divergent outcomes.
Last September, Hood published Variable in/by Design, a survey of 523 teachers across Aotearoa, which found a critical lack of support and resources to do the work the model requires of them. Her conclusion is that the fundamental approach is flawed; she argues that the most successful education systems have curricula that are comprehensive and content-rich. “Systems that require students to follow the same, sequenced curricula are among the world’s most equitable and high-performing.”
The good news is that changing the curriculum is relatively straightforward. For Hood, this is the low-hanging fruit of education reform. “Teachers need a lot more guidance on the key things they should be teaching. I’m not a fan of saying, ‘On Monday morning you’re going to teach this.’ I’m not talking about prescribing everything, but giving them far more guidance than they currently receive. And, just as importantly, resourcing that.”
The new head
Erica Stanford had been Minister of Education for eight days when the Pisa results were announced. Her pre-political career was in export sales, then writing and producing reality TV, on shows such as Piha Rescue and Last Chance Dog, which followed dangerous dogs on death row. She entered Parliament in 2017, replacing long-serving Murray McCully as National MP for East Coast Bays, and was promoted to the front bench when Christopher Luxon became leader, picking up the education and immigration portfolios where she quickly emerged as one of the Opposition’s star performers.
Although the latest Pisa results were poor, the timing was not. Education is enemy territory for National: the ministry is large – its staffing has surged by 55% in the past six years while the number of teachers in the public system has grown by 5%, barely tracking population growth. The PPTA grumbles that the expansion of the ministry is contributing to the teacher shortage.
The ministry is also bureaucratic and fiercely ideological. The unions are powerful, well organised and broadly hostile but Stanford intends to drive significant change in her sector and the spectre of declining standards is her most effective weapon. “We will be moving at pace,” she declares with more than a hint of steel in her voice, “because every year we lose is another cohort of kids who are falling behind.”
Stanford intends to mandate the compulsory teaching of literacy, numeracy and reading in primary and intermediate schools for one hour for each subject every day. She plans to discard the current student-centric, competencies-based model of teaching and set explicit requirements covering the knowledge and skills schools must teach. “We need to return to a knowledge-based curriculum,” she says. “If you look at the curricula of the world-leading systems, that’s what they do. It’s where – in part – we have gone so wrong.”
The new government also plans to introduce standardised assessment. Schools will be required to measure each child’s progress against the curriculum and report on this to their parents twice a year. And they’ll also assess their teachers, requiring graduates to sit exams to demonstrate their ability to teach reading, writing, maths and science. Existing teachers will be required to do professional development to ensure their competency across the subject areas.
“Curriculum. Assessment. Teacher training,” Stanford stresses. “There are other important issues in education but these are the structural things we need to get right. And if we don’t, it doesn’t matter how many children are in the class or how nice the buildings are. If you don’t have a great curriculum, the right pedagogy and you aren’t assessing kids along the way then you won’t get there. And I have an absolute laser focus on getting those things embedded in the first term.”
The kids aren’t all right
When Jacinda Ardern resigned a year ago Chris Hipkins replaced her as prime minister, and Jan Tinetti, a former primary school principal who chaired the principals council of the NZEI, the primary teachers’ union, replaced him as minister of education.
“Things aren’t as dire as some commentators think,” Tinetti says when asked about the state of the system. And she questions whether programmes like Pisa are relevant.
But things could certainly be better. She believes some of the issues with the current system go back further than the early 2000s, while others are more recent and largely attributable to declines in student wellbeing.
In the late 1980s, the fourth Labour government introduced Tomorrow’s Schools. The neoliberals decentralised the entire compulsory education system, transferring it to local community control. Each public school in New Zealand became a self-managing crown entity, administered by its own staff and board of trustees, all of which largely exist in isolation from each other.
No one else runs their education system like this, and Labour now believes it compromises the ability to hold schools accountable for performance, and that principals and boards are distracted from their core roles of teaching students.
Hipkins convened a taskforce to look into this in 2019 but decided changing the model would be too disruptive.
And Tinetti believes that when we compare current student performance to that of previous generations we’re forgetting to account for the changing nature of young people, and the way in which the world has changed over the past 10-15 years.
When asked about unequal outcomes in the system, she replies, “As someone who has been a principal in low socio-economic areas, I would say it’s not just about poverty. It’s about trauma, and what young people are facing. We’ve got a lot of domestic and sexual violence in this country that we need to address.
“But we also need to address coping mechanisms. Mental health is another issue we’ve seen an increase in. And we need to see more support for young people around that.”
Ministry of Health data shows the number of young people experiencing high or very high levels of psychological distress more than doubled between 2020 and 2022, from 11% to 23.6%.
Final marks
Research company Ipsos conducts regular surveys into which political parties are trusted more on which issues: on education, the public has always trusted Labour but in mid-2023 National overtook them. The subsequent survey had Labour ahead again but there is an opportunity for the new government. If Stanford can advance her agenda – and parts of the sector will oppose her every millimetre of the way – it will be even more significant than the reforms of the early 2000s. Education could become a key political battleground.
For Nina Hood, politics and policy can solve some problems but many of the issues facing the system are socio-economic – though that could be a solution, rather than just an impasse. “Schools are being put in the position where they are responsible for dealing with the majority of society’s problems,” she says. “There’s an argument that schools are the best places for that to happen because they’re one of the few community institutions we have left. But at the moment they are not resourced to play that role.”
Ryman plans to turn the derelict Wellington teachers college into a retirement village. Hood believes that the training regime for new teachers is equally decrepit and in need of renovation. She argues that the fundamental role of teaching has changed dramatically and the system needs to recognise and respond to this.
“Teaching has become hugely complex. Most teachers across all schools will tell you they have a growing number of students coming into the classroom with complex needs. The students might be neurodiverse – and I can tell you now the school system is not even close to supporting neurodivergent children – but they’re also seeing more and more children coming into class with significant mental health needs. And teachers are the front line for dealing with that – as well as being responsible for teaching.”
Follow the science
The government is signalling a ‘big shift’ in the way subjects are taught.
How do you take in tens of thousands of 5-year-olds who can’t read and transform them into young adults who can flourish in a complex technological society?
For most of the 20th century, the study and design of public education systems was a combination of field experiments and informed guesswork. But over the past few decades, neuroscientists have put children into fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) machines to monitor their brain activity while learning, and cognitive psychologists have modelled the internal mental processes that govern attention, problem solving, memory, learning and language.
As well, education researchers have carried out experiments to determine the efficacy of different teaching approaches and techniques based on the psychology and neuroscience literature.
The results are grouped together under an umbrella term: the science of learning. It’s a large and still changing field, but two key findings point to fundamental problems with New Zealand’s approach to teaching. The first is cognitive load theory, which says that humans have a very limited capacity for processing new information.
We learn best when we’re taught new ideas in discrete, simplified chunks. If you teach students too much, they’re overloaded and stop learning.
Before they build on the new knowledge – with more complex mathematical techniques or new words or scientific concepts – they need to engage with what they’ve just learnt, practise it and embed it in their long-term memory. Otherwise, they’ll lose it. So teaching students multiple strategies for approaching and solving problems overwhelms and confuses them (see “Forget the fads” below).
The second point is that nearly all humans seem to process new information the same way. Our student-centric, competencies-based model promotes critical thinking and problem solving over knowledge or rote-memorisation.
But this is premised on the notion that students have divergent learning styles depending on their personality, neurotype and cultural and ethnic backgrounds. There’s very little evidence in the neuroscience or cognitive psychology literature that this is true.
Instead, we all learn by encoding chunks of knowledge about a topic in our long-term memories. Any critical thinking or problem-solving comes downstream of that.
Education Minister Erica Stanford is evangelical on this topic. “A huge part of where we’ve gone wrong in the last 30 years is in not following the science,” she says. Stanford intends to change that, and in her mind this will overarch everything that happens across the sector.
“That will be a very big shift. It will be embedded into teacher education. It will be embedded into every document. It will be embedded into the common practice model. That is my job at the moment with the ministry: to make my expectations clear that we will be following the science of learning.”
Digital decline
Too much screen time is bad for your maths, it seems.
New Zealand wasn’t the only country to register disappointing Pisa results. Between 2012 and 2023, reading, maths and science scores declined consistently across the OECD.
The fall was sharper during and after the Covid pandemic, but for the past decade something has negatively affected student achievement across nations, income levels and ethnic groups.
What changed in 2012? There are many theories but the most popular candidate is that in the early 2010s the use of smartphone-mediated social media exploded.
The OCED researchers found that the number of hours spent on digital devices each day negatively correlates to student performance in maths. The more time beyond one hour students used devices for leisure, the worse their mathematical performance.
The problem seems especially acute for Kiwi students, who were near the top of the OECD tables in terms of student-reported digital distraction, either from other students or using their own devices.
National campaigned on removing cellphones from classrooms. Teachers are dubious about spending time policing cellphone usage, and Labour opposed this, believing schools should set their own policies on digital devices.
“There’s a digital divide,” Labour’s education spokesperson Jan Tinetti argues. “Some schools feel they need to introduce devices in the classroom to overcome that.”
But National feels validated by the Pisa findings, and Education Minister Erica Stanford has pledged to ban phones from classes during the new government’s first 100 days.
Forget the fads
Scientific evidence will be the guide to curriculum changes in the future.
For the past two years, the Ministry of Education has been refreshing the school curriculum. In mid-July, a draft document for the science component was sent to a select number of secondary school teachers requesting feedback and it was quickly leaked to the media. This was the now-infamous science curriculum that didn’t mention physics, biology or chemistry. Instead, it proposed a radical new transdisciplinary approach in which science was structured around abstract concepts such as “biodiversity and resilience” and “At the cutting edge: historical and contemporary”, a category which exemplified Māui snaring the sun as a breakthrough in knowledge about the natural world. The ministry hastily explained that the document was just a draft: there would be changes in response to the (very vigorous) feedback. The then-Labour government pledged that physics, biology and chemistry would still play an important role in the science curriculum.
For Education Minister Erica Stanford, the document pointed to a systemic failure in the way this country implements education policy: sweeping changes are often driven by academic fads rather than scientific evidence. She cites the “whole word” approach to literacy, in which students were taught to read by memorising the shapes of words rather than the sounds of letters, and the numeracy project in which students were taught multiple strategies to solve mathematical problems rather than memorising times tables or basic techniques like column multiplication.
Both models are now regarded as unsuccessful approaches: neither is currently in use, but they were enthusiastically adopted across public schools and teacher training.
Stanford was appalled by the radical new direction signalled by the draft curriculum. “We looked around the world to find out if anyone else did that. Scotland’s public school system seemed to be the only one.
“If you’re an academic sitting in your office, it might sound interesting to rewrite the curriculum around these big topics. In practice, if you are a biology teacher in Northland and someone says to you, ‘You’re teaching physics next year because we don’t have a physics teacher’ – which is not unusual – and you don’t have a proper curriculum and you don’t have key learning outcomes and you don’t have good resources – instead, you’re just given these vague topic areas – what are you going to do? Because that is the reality of teaching at the moment.”
This story was originally published in the NZ Listener in January, 2023.