When policy fails, it is often because of some combination of ideology, cronyism, incompetence or malevolence: the four horsemen of New Zealand politics. But recent weeks have seen an announcement from Education Minister Erica Stanford that the government will no longer build the open-plan classrooms that the previous National government championed, and that the future of NCEA is under review after a scathing report into the credibility of the assessment framework.
Two key education reforms of the past 20 years appear to have failed the students they were supposed to help. No one wanted to wreck the public education system. Everyone had the best interests of students in mind, and most changes were informed by distinguished academics, implemented by diligent public servants, passed by well-meaning politicians.
But 25 years ago when the OECD began its Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) rankings, we had one of the top-ranking education systems in the world, and it has been steadily downhill since then.
In 2024, an OECD report on New Zealand’s economic prospects warned that our self-inflicted damage to public education is a key threat to the nation’s prosperity. Where did all the clever experts go wrong?
Most people who recall their own school days instinctively understood that open-plan classrooms were a dubious idea. But the social sciences can be prone to academic fads and in the 2000s and early 2010s, a suite of pleasingly counterintuitive theories swept through education studies.
These were known as the Modern Learning Environment (MLE), which declared the single classrooms of the 20th century were “factories” or “cells”. Teachers were barriers to education, getting in the way of the self-directed learning of children, who are born with an innate love of maths and grammar. Teachers should be “guides on the side, not sages on the stage”. Students would flourish in the brighter, airier, more flexible environments of merged classrooms. Peer-to-peer mentoring would break out. Digital technologies would do … something?
All of this was highly theoretical, but it was warmly received by the Ministry of Education, probably because classrooms with fewer internal walls and shared resources were seen as cheaper than traditional builds. Cost became even more pressing in the wake of the Christchurch earthquakes, which damaged more than 100 schools.
As subsequent critics noted, MLEs were very vibes-based. The principals who ran the pilot programmes liked them, and a narrow majority of teachers who used them supported them when surveyed. But there was never any hard data on student outcomes to substantiate the many billions of dollars invested in the scheme, which turned out to be more expensive than building standard classrooms, requiring complex bespoke designs that led to lengthy delays and budget blowouts. Many children found the open plans distracting. Early adopters have been refitting their classrooms back to the sinister prison cells of the 20th-century factory system.
Theory vs practice
The theory of NCEA made sense. The old school certificate regime was simple enough, but critics had long argued that its focus on exam results rewarded a set of narrow cognitive tasks: the ability to absorb facts deemed important by a centralised body, then recall them at speed in a high-pressure situation.
What about different learning styles? Different cultural backgrounds? Vocational pathways? NCEA solved these problems, freeing students to choose personalised subject pathways. They could pursue their own interests, playing to their strengths and being assessed holistically, developing life skills and demonstrating understanding, instead of just regurgitating dry facts.
Many academics and policy experts still love NCEA deeply and unconditionally. Teachers, parents, students and employers are more sceptical. The system is notoriously complex. Schools have come to dread induction evenings when they attempt to guide baffled parents through the labyrinth of different credits, standards and endorsements that their children will wander in. There are modifications nearly every year, so the teachers themselves are often confused.
The complexity seems to conceal poor performance: you can’t help your child improve their grades if you have no idea what they mean. A recent ministerial briefing suggested the flexibility of the system allowed students to stockpile credits across a range of unchallenging but disconnected subjects, chosen because their internal assessments made them easy to pass.
Recent years have seen more schools shifting to alternative assessment frameworks, usually Cambridge or the International Baccalaureate, raising concerns of an informal two-tier qualification system, with universities and prospective employers regarding NCEA results as innately inferior.
Sweeping reforms
Stanford has been one of this government’s most impactful ministers. In the past 18 months, she’s banned cellphones from classrooms and introduced new maths and English curricula to primary schools, while her new secondary curricula are out for consultation. She’s mandated the adoption of structured literacy, imposed standardised assessments for reading, writing and maths, provided maths training for primary teachers, and created a new crown agency for school property management.
It all sums up to the most sweeping education reform programme since Tomorrow’s Schools in the late 1980s – and that’s before we factor in NCEA’s revision or replacement. Most of this has been bitterly opposed by academics and the teaching unions, but Labour has been curiously muted on Stanford’s reforms, preferring to concentrate fire on the easier target of school lunches.
Perhaps the opposition is just biding its time, and all of these changes will be rolled back with a switch of government.
But even the ministry quietly admits the current system is only “fair” rather than “good”. It’s possible that National’s new schemes will fail to deliver over time – but hopefully they’re allowed to fail on their own terms and not be replaced out of hand for some new suite of fashionable theories. Perhaps they’ll even succeed, and Stanford might graduate Parliament with a very exclusive qualification: government minister who actually fixed something.
