This year the Herald’s award-winning newsroom produced a range of first-class journalism, including Jacinda Ardern’s shock resignation, the Auckland anniversary floods, arts patron Sir James Wallace’s prison sentence, the election of Christopher’s Luxon government and the All Blacks’ narrow defeat in the Rugby World Cup final.
This summer we’re bringing back some of the best-read Premium articles of 2023. Today we take a look at why New Zealand’s once world-leading school system is in trouble.
New Zealand’s literacy and numeracy rates continue to decline across the board, leading many to question where we have gone wrong. In Making the Grade education reporter Amy Wiggins explores the issues and seeks solutions to a problem that threatens future generations.
NZ’s struggling school education system
Walking home one day, an 8-year-old Jacob Neary burst into tears.
Surprised by the sudden outburst, his mum asked what was wrong.
“I did a maths test today and I couldn’t read it,” came the answer.
As soon as Jacob started primary school learning was difficult.
“From a very young age, it’s always been really difficult for me to remember information and retain it,” Jacob, now 17, told the Herald.
“Even just the basic words. For the life of me I couldn’t remember.
Mum Sally Neary said no matter how hard Jacob worked, he couldn’t get his head around the basics of reading the same way his classmates were.
Two weeks into the start of Year 3 Neary decided it wasn’t just because he was a boy or because children learned at different speeds.
That’s when she did some research and found SPELD New Zealand - an organisation that works with children and adults who have specific learning difficulties like dyslexia and dyscalculia.
An assessment found that Jacob’s struggle at school was because he had dyslexia and struggled to learn the same way as many of his peers.
Jacob is not alone. Even without learning difficulties, many New Zealand school students are failing to grasp fundamental academic skills that provide the basis for higher learning and jobs.
A 2020 Unicef report found over a third of our 15-year-olds did not have basic proficiency in literacy and maths. It’s one of a series of international and national reports which have shown New Zealand students are falling behind in the core subjects of reading, writing, maths and science.
The Ministry of Education itself admitted in late 2020 that the “current system for literacy learning is clearly not working for a reasonably large group of students”
Maths and science have also been badly neglected, especially at primary level where many teachers lack the knowledge to teach the subjects well.
Student achievement in core subjects has declined over the past two decades at both national and international level.
Sexual consent education in schools
New Zealand schools focus on enabling students to gain qualifications but are young people leaving school with the skills they need to succeed in life?
Being taught about consent at school could have changed Genna Hawkins-Boulton’s life.
The 25-year-old Auckland woman was sexually assaulted by someone she knew in her early 20s.
Neither she nor the man involved had any education about consent and it was not until the Teach Us Consent campaign took off in Australia in early 2021 that she realised that what had happened was sexual assault.
Hawkins-Boulton said some schools taught consent really well as part of sexuality education, while other schools focused on other parts of the subject.
It was that realisation that prompted her and Auckland University students Jasmine Gray and Laura Porteous to set up Let’s Talk Consent.
The group has already spoken to a number of MPs and set up a petition calling on the Government to follow Australia’s lead and make age-appropriate consent education compulsory in schools from Years 1-13.
Amy Wiggins explores whether schools could do more to teach students about healthy relationships.
Why Kiwi kids can’t do maths
When New Zealand 9- to 10-year-olds were asked to solve 27 × 43, only 16 per cent got the right answer – from a multiple choice question.
Mathematician and tutor Dr Audrey Tan said our maths education system was literally worse than useless on that relatively simple equation for Year 5 students in the 2018/19 Trends in International Maths and Science Study (TIMSS).
“If the children had randomly guessed, their success rate should have been around 25 per cent.
“That means we’ve introduced something into the NZ education system that is so bad, our Kiwi kids would have been better off guessing.”
Many in the education sector, including Tan, are now arguing that a focus on the science of learning and a return to traditional teaching methods will go a long way in lifting achievement.
The Labour Government responded with a maths action plan and the development of a common practice model for literacy and numeracy but the debate reignited after the launch of the Herald’s Making the Grade series and the National Party’s education policy, which focused on a back to basics approach in reading, writing, maths and science.
Much of the debate focused on National’s promise to bring back national testing in primary schools, but many critics of the current system argue that the bigger issue remains how children are learning in the first place.
Teaching handwriting ‘could lift student achievement’
Ten minutes of handwriting a day in every junior class could turn around New Zealand’s falling literacy rate, according to a handwriting expert.
But the prospect looks unlikely, as a survey of 850 teachers carried out in 2022 found almost 90 per cent of those who trained in the past 20 years received no instruction in how to teach handwriting.
Handwriting expert and education researcher Helen Walls believed making sure all junior children were taught handwriting again “could be our silver bullet” in lifting achievement in literacy.
It was simple to implement and could “change everything”, she said.
Learning to form letters physically helped children to memorise letter shapes, which made writing automatic and much easier later on.
“We’d have happy children and children who felt good about themselves, children who were behaving well at school, children who were attending school every day.
“We’d have children by Year 3 or 4 who were genuinely able to engage in their own independent research projects.”
History of surfing v New Zealand Wars - the battle over our school curriculum
“Describe the causes and consequences of an historical event.”
It is achievement standards like that, combined with one of the world’s least prescriptive curriculums, which have allowed history classes to study the history of perfume or surfing - or to tackle a major topic such as the US black civil rights movement but largely ignore New Zealand’s own race relations history.
“The old curriculum just had, ‘you need to understand these things’. It didn’t have any specification of knowledge and no skills,” said New Zealand History Teachers’ Association Kaiārahi (navigator) Craig Thornhill.
“Schools could do potentially anything.”
But it’s not a problem limited only to history.
Critics say the flexibility of the New Zealand Curriculum in all subject areas has left important learning to chance and contributed to educational inequality.
Amy Wiggins looks at whether part of the problem with New Zealand’s declining education system lies in what we are teaching students.
