New Zealand’s once world-leading school system is in trouble. Literacy and numeracy rates continue to decline across the board, leading many to question where we have gone wrong. In the third and final part of our Making the Grade series, education reporter Amy Wiggins asks whether the problem lies in
‘Knowledge poor’ school curriculum blamed for falling student achievement
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“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.
According to Dr Bronwyn Wood, Associate Professor in the School of Education at Victoria University in Wellington, the New Zealand curriculum’s openness would put us on a par with only a handful of countries in the world - Scotland, to some extent Wales and the Netherlands.
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While that meant teachers had the flexibility to teach topics that students were more interested in, it also created an “ambiguity” across the system about what was being taught and meant New Zealand history was often being neglected.
“There’s a real catch-22 there because we’re encouraging teachers to meet the needs of individual students but at the same time there’s a trade-off going on - a trade-off between knowledge and engagement in some ways,” she said.
“All of us at university would probably say we’re noticing gaps in knowledge in our students because of this eclectic way that content choice has been done. There’d be stuff that you’d expect them to know like apartheid or something like that and you’d find the whole class just didn’t know what that was. It’s not their fault, they haven’t been exposed to it because they were focusing on other areas.”
That was the state of the New Zealand history curriculum up until this year and exactly what former Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern was trying to avoid when she announced in 2019 that New Zealand history would be taught in all schools.
“Too much was left to chance in the teaching and learning of New Zealand history,” she said.
“We have listened carefully to the growing calls from New Zealanders to know more about our own history and identity. With this in mind it makes sense for the National Curriculum to make clear the expectation that our history is part of the local curriculum and marau ā kura in every school and kura,” Ardern said as part of the announcement.
To make sure every student received the same education the Aotearoa New Zealand Histories Curriculum has been developed and must be taught in every school up to Year 10.
According to Wood and Thornhill, the creation of the Aotearoa New Zealand Histories Curriculum was a big shift and clarified what students were expected to know.
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“It’s an absolute paradigm shift between the past and the present in terms of what is being taught in New Zealand schools,” Thornhill said.
Wood said history had acted as a “canary in the mine”, exposing the effect the flexibility of both the curriculum and the NCEA system had in creating gaps in students’ knowledge.
“Assessment mirrors curriculum,” she said.
Many in the education sector agreed the problem was the same across the whole curriculum.
Education Hub founder Dr Nina Hood said the lack of specificity in the current New Zealand Curriculum meant there was a “very good chance you are going to be learning very different things” at different schools.
Michael Johnston of the New Zealand Initiative believed the current curriculum was “knowledge poor and does not provide teachers with sufficient guidance”.
“The lack of prescribed knowledge in the New Zealand Curriculum allows for ad hoc approaches to subject content and muddled sequencing of learning, resulting in many students developing fractured and incomplete understanding,” he said in his Manifesto for Improving New Zealand’s School System.
“It also means that the learning experiences of students across the country are, inevitably, uneven. Content and depth both vary widely, exacerbating educational inequality.”
Documents produced by Government agencies give credence to those concerns.
The Education Review Office (ERO) found almost a third of New Zealand schools were failing to provide students with good-quality reading and writing instruction in a 2009 report.
ERO’s 2012 Science in the New Zealand Curriculum report also found only 27 per cent of schools were providing generally effective science programmes for Year 5 to 8 students.
Meanwhile, many children weren’t receiving sufficient or appropriate opportunities to learn maths, a study cited by the Ministry of Education said.
Falling levels of achievement have prompted many in the industry to call for a return to a curriculum that gives teachers more guidance on what they should be teaching at each level in a bid to make sure every student learns the foundational skills needed to function in society.
Education Minister Jan Tinetti has also acknowledged content was largely “left to chance” and said the curriculum “refresh” underway at the moment aimed to change that - but some question whether it goes far enough.
The debate
The issue was brought to the forefront after the launch of the Herald’s Making the Grade series, when the National Party announced its education policy, including a new curriculum based on a back-to-basics approach to reading, writing, maths and science.
In announcing the policy, National leader Christopher Luxon said “the curriculum’s wooliness” meant teachers were spending their own time trying to figure out what they were supposed to be teaching.
“They should not have to do that. It should be clear.”
Education Hub founder Dr Nina Hood agreed it was problematic that there was very little content specified in the current curriculum
“We need to be thinking carefully about adding more specificity to the curriculum - that doesn’t mean you are prescribing everything.
“We need to get a baseline of content knowledge within schools.”
Maths tutor Audrey Tan agreed the slide in achievement lay in the “freedom that our decentralised education system affords schools”.
“It’s the ability to write a localised curriculum and who knows what that might actually look like. Who’s actually checking?
“There is a great danger that some students are missing out on big chunks of learning and schools aren’t being held accountable.”
However, teachers union representatives say the flexibility of the current curriculum allows lessons to be better tailored to students as long as teachers have the time and resources to devote to developing good content.
President of the primary teachers union New Zealand Educational Institute Te Riu Roa, Mark Potter believes the current curriculum is the best the country has had in his 38 years teaching and leading schools.
The problem with very prescriptive curriculums was that they did not give teachers the flexibility to adjust lessons to suit the level the students were at or teach in a way they would better understand, Potter said.
Attitudes had changed since the “good old golden ages you think of when we had spelling lists” and a large amount of rote learning, he said.
“Society accepted a large number of children failing and society doesn’t accept that anymore.”
Dr Lisa Darragh of the Auckland Univesity School of Curriculum and Pedagogy also argued that the problem was not the curriculum, but what teachers did with it.
“The lack of specificity can make it very relevant to their community but that same lack of specificity leaves some teachers in some schools feeling lost about where to go.”
She believed a major problem was that a lot of schools had not had a lot of access to professional development in maths in recent years so teachers were interpreting the maths curriculum on their own.
Potter accepted there was a desire among some teachers for a more prescriptive curriculum which he believed was a result of “high stakes assessments” like the now defunct National Standards.
“It created a desire for ‘just tell me what to do’”, he said. ”It’s created a generation of teachers who know nothing else.”
‘Making maths relevant is what good teachers will do anyway’
Massey University Institute of Education Professor Jodie Hunter said New Zealand’s poor results in international tests were related to the opportunities children had to learn, which were in turn directed by the curriculum.
“From a teacher’s perspective, if you aren’t sure what to be teaching it makes it awfully hard to teach,” she said.
“From my perspective, where I think there should be freedom to align with your class is in the context that you’re using for the task, not of the content.
“If you look at maths education research, a localised curriculum should be about developing a curriculum that’s got contexts that are relevant to your children - so that they can see mathematics in their lives. It shouldn’t be that you’re able to choose the mathematics difficulty.”
Tan said by the time students came to her for maths tutoring, all she could do was “wallpaper over the cracks”.
“There are significant gaps when they come to us. What we are about is just equipping them with the tools they need to get through their assessments but it never feels like it’s a proper maths education.”
She believed a curriculum should be a clear description of what teachers ought to teach each year rather than leaving it up to schools in an effort to allow teachers to make it relevant to their communities.
“Localisation does mean that we can make the learning more relevant but making maths relevant is what good teachers will do anyway, even with a highly prescribed, centralised curriculum,” she said.
Auckland University School of Critical Studies in Education Professor Elizabeth Rata wrote, in a paper published in the international journal Review of Education: “There is no standardised national curriculum which identifies the knowledge to be taught across the country.”
“This means that it is not possible to know what is taught in any given school and where the knowledge is taken from,” she wrote.
“The shift to a localised, outcomes-based curriculum has created a situation where students studying English in one part of the country may never encounter Shakespeare’s plays, Katherine Mansfield’s stories or Hone Tuwhare’s poetry, while a student attending another school may do so.”
Steve Cornelius founder of tutoring service Educate NZ agreed there was too much variance in what students were taught.
“Teachers interpret it how they wish to interpret it and deliver it how they want to deliver it. That’s a concern. It’s not something that’s standardised for every kid.”
‘We have to get that balance right’
The “refresh” of the curriculum currently being carried out by the Ministry of Education is largely being welcomed by both sides - but many worry the Government is trying to keep one foot in each camp.
Johnston believes the curriculum needs to be more specific about what is taught at each curriculum level along with guidance for teachers on the sequencing of learning - including detailed literacy and numeracy progressions.
The NZEI argues it needs to allow schools to root their teaching in the local community.
Speaking to the Herald, Education Minister Jan Tinetti accepted there was too much being “left to chance”.
She said the aim of the refresh, called Te Mātaiaho, was to make sure every young person left school with the skills and knowledge needed to fulfill their potential.
“One of the aims of The New Zealand Curriculum refresh is to achieve a better balance between national and local decision making so that learning is not left to chance but there is still flexibility for teachers to make learning meaningful to their students and communities.”
“School leaders, teachers and communities have all said that they need more information on what learning is expected at each age and stage across the curriculum.
“We need to be explicit about what it is that needs to be taught and when it needs to be taught. That’s what the refresh of the curriculum is doing.”
Tinetti said educationalists in places like Singapore, which has very high achievement rates, were envious of the creativity of Kiwi kids.
“We have to get that balance right. While we do want to lift those literacy and mathematics results, that’s really critically important, we’ve also got to not lose what’s good about our curriculum and that’s the fact that our kids are creative thinkers.”
NZEI past president Liam Rutherford welcomed the curriculum refresh saying the draft document, called Te Mātaiaho, was “outstanding” and had a much greater focus on schools understanding their local communities and designing it for their local community.
“It’s giving kids a strong sense of who they are and their place in the world.”
Current president Mark Potter said the curriculum refresh that was underway was a welcome chance for educators to reflect on how it was working.
“As long as it gets supported, it’s got the potential to allow teachers to make something much better.”
Darragh agreed it was “due a refresh”.
“It’s been 15 years. We’re quite excited that it’s aiming to be a bi-cultural curriculum,” she said.
“The new maths strategy is talking about a multi-pronged approach. That’s exactly what’s needed.”
But for Auckland University’s Professor Elizabeth Rata, the draft of the new curriculum was far from what she hoped for.
“It’s a national disgrace,” she said.
“What we’ve got is a curriculum without content. It’s an ideological manifesto.
“Children in the far north should receive the same education as children in the far south - that shouldn’t be left to chance.”
Despite sharing many of the same views, Johnston is more optimistic.
He welcomed the additional detail in some areas but said it was unclear at this stage if Te Mātaiaho, would provide enough guidance for teachers.
“Under the number strategies section of the current Year 3 curriculum it stipulates that students should be able to “use simple additive strategies with whole numbers and fractions,” but does not specify what those strategies are,” he said
“However, the refreshed Year 3 curriculum includes more detail, for example, students should be able to “solve addition and subtraction problems with two and three-digit numbers”.
But other areas of the maths curriculum remained as vague as in the 2007 curriculum, he said, citing one requirement as being able to “generalise the properties of addition and subtraction”.
Despite the additional detail about expected knowledge, he said: “Te Mātaiaho, at this stage, lacks any advice to teachers on how best to sequence learning, or to manage cognitive load and ensure that foundational knowledge is solidly acquired before being built upon.
“Nonetheless, the greater detail provided in Te Mātaiaho is a step in the right direction.”
Read the whole series
Part 1: Why NZ kids are falling behind at school
Part 2: ‘They would have been better off guessing’ - why Kiwi kids can’t do maths
