The government likes to trumpet its back to basics approach to education, and the minister leading the charge, Erica Stanford, is a full-throated supporter of that.
‘‘You have to build a solid foundation [in primary education] before you can start thinking about secondary, and that’s where we started,’’ she said.
‘‘You start as soon as they enter school, with a knowledge-rich curriculum, with explicit teaching, following the science of learning, with all of the resources, the professional learning and development, the assessment along the way to make sure you’re tracking the journey and catching them if they start to fall, and intervening where you need to.’’
The cynical could pitch the changes Ms Stanford has implemented as being a return to the old days of the three Rs — reading, writing and arithmetic. While the reality is a touch more complex than that, the importance of those three subjects have been amplified at the junior level, and regular testing has been introduced as a way to determine whether the desired progress has been achieved.
‘‘It’s very, very difficult to teach a 15-year-old how to read,’’ Ms Stanford said.
‘‘That is essentially what high schools were saying to me when I became the minister, ‘we don’t even have the teachers who know how to teach kids to read, because that’s not what we do. We’re secondary teachers. We are critically analysing things and writing essays, but we’re getting kids who are struggling with the basics, they don’t know their times tables, they don’t know how to write full sentences, and they’re struggling to read’ . . . we knew we had to start right from the very beginning to make sure those basics were right.’’
It sounds reasonable enough, but teachers and principals are far from happy. The day after Ms Stanford spoke to the Otago Daily Times, unionists, academics and principals combined to produce an advertisement in daily newspapers condemning the curriculum framework and six draft curriculum documents as not being fit for purpose and representing ‘‘a profound, unworkable narrowing of curriculum scope’’.
Ms Stanford, perhaps in anticipation of what was to come, strongly disputed that the government was going too far or too fast in reviewing and rewriting the curriculum.
She said that the government had already taken steps to pull some initiatives back, and it had made changes to the pace of the curriculum rollout. She was also consulting further on the curriculum and would take further advice based on that feedback whether or not to slow the pace of change down slightly.
‘‘But I’ll just say to you that 60,000 students start school every single year, and we have been in curriculum change since 2017.’’
She said the only changes that had been delivered had come under her leadership and that had been in two curriculum areas — English and Maths.
‘‘That’s it in 10 years. And 60,000 kids start school every year. That’s an entire cohort of kids who have gone all the way through who haven’t had the benefit of an updated curriculum. So, yes, there is an urgency, because as you can see at the top end, kids are not literate and numerate when they hit NCEA. So it is getting the balance right of making sure we’re doing right by those students and those parents and those families, but also pacing it out enough so that it’s not too much of a change in the sector.
‘‘Our advice has always been, go at your own pace. Do what works best for you and your school in your circumstances. We don’t expect perfect from day one. Just get on the journey, and we’ll provide you with the resources and the professional learning and development, and all the tools that you need.’’
The day before Ms Stanford’s visit to Dunedin she was in the House for the Education portfolio section of the Annual Review Debate. There she faced several questions about another of her opponent’s bugbears with the school reforms — the place of the Treaty of Waitangi in the brave new education world.
As it happens Ms Stanford, who augmented her BA in politics (first class honours) with a minor in Maori studies, is passionate about New Zealanders being taught and understanding their history —including the Treaty. Her point of philosophical difference is that it is the responsibility of the Crown and not of schools to meet Treaty responsibilities.
‘‘It was frustrating last night that none of the questions were about raising achievement, closing the equity gap,’’ she said.
‘‘I am here to raise achievement and make sure that parents know that their children are achieving and that we’re properly monitoring progress. We’re reporting to them so that they know how they’re doing.’’
Ms Stanford likes to cite education research to back her opinions — she can drop the names of researchers and academic papers at the drop of a hat and claims to have read everything that the Education Review Office has ever written.
Despite education being a political battlefield, she is adamant that much of what she has read is non-partisan.
‘‘If you want to go and look at what they’re doing in Australia, under a Labor government, the federal minister, Jason Clare, is doing exactly the same reform I am because this is not political philosophy. This is science and data. And I can tell you right now that [opposition education spokeswoman] Ginny Anderson and the Labour Party are on the wrong side of science.’’
While much of what the government has done has affected primary education, secondary schools are in for a shake-up as well, with a planned replacement of the NCEA qualification.
That will likely not see the light of day unless National returns to government after the November 7 election, but it is intended to be phased in from 2028, when the current Year 9 cohort will embark on the new qualification system.
‘‘Teachers and the leaders of schools will make sure that it’s implemented really well,’’ Ms Stanford said.
‘‘It’s too important not to do. We have had too many tweaks around the edges of NCEA trying to make a system that we thought was world-leading work. It turns out nobody followed us into this weird credit-based system of mixing and matching a whole bunch of credits around a student.
‘‘I’ve always said if you work hard in NCEA, like my children and others, if they work hard, it is a good qualification. But it is too easy to gain. There is too much reliance on continual assessment all of the time and small chunks of learning rather than having a consistent curriculum that every child in the country, no matter which school they go to, learns.’’
In her proposed new system a pupil learning English in Dunedin or learning English in Ms Stanford’s Auckland electorate of East Coast Bays will be studying the same material and marked against the same national standard.
‘‘That consistency and international benchmarking has been absolutely crucial and that is the key part of all of these reforms. Although the way we grade it and the assessments, that’s secondary,’’ she said.
‘‘The most key, important, part is the curriculum that every single child will learn.’’
