Streaming of school pupils has been put under the microscope after New Zealand’s largest education union recently voted to formally oppose the practice.
It involves separating pupils into classes, based on their intellectual or academic ability.
The New Zealand Educational Institute national executive and its Miro Maori Council want to abolish streaming, and the stance has been backed by the Otago Primary Principals’ Association.
NZEI national president Liam Rutherford said there was "eager support" for the motion.
"We know streaming is an outdated practice.
"Decades of evidence have shown that for our tamariki, and for Maori and Pasifika children especially, streaming has long had negative impacts on their educational achievement and their participation at school.
"We believe it is past time to recognise this and transition our teaching and learning practices toward more inclusive, supportive approaches that support our children’s learning and success."
Mr Rutherford said many schools had found alternatives to streaming already.
"Our schools need to be equipped to transition away from streaming and toward mana-enhancing models of teaching and learning.
"But we’re not starting from scratch. We can look to those many schools that have started this journey already, doing some incredible, world-leading things in this area, as we begin to make these changes across our education system."
Otago Primary Principals’ Association president Gareth Swete said the region’s primary schools recognised the need to develop its tamariki through experience, diversity and opportunity.
At present, many schools employed many different strategies to achieve this and recognised that streaming pupils based on set criteria could often be detrimental.
"Our learners all have strengths in different areas, and can require additional support in others.
"Our teachers are excellent at being able to provide differentiated learning for all students within a classroom.
"This includes opportunities for leadership development through a Tuakana-teina approach, facilitating open-ended learning that requires children to collaborate with others, recognise that all children bring different experiences and cognitive processes to a group, and to be taught empathy and communication through working with a wide variety of peers."
Otago Secondary Principals’ Association president and Blue Mountain College principal Lindy Cavanagh-Monaghan said she could not speak for other secondary schools in the region, but believed the beauty of the Tomorrow’s Schools model was that each school had the flexibility to respond to the philosophical stand-point of its particular community in relation to concepts such as streaming.
