Kia ora e te whānau

Welcome back! As term two gets underway, I hope you are feeling the benefits of a relaxing holiday break and that you took time to recharge and re-energise.

If you haven’t yet visited our NZPF National Conference website, then make it a priority and catch the early-bird registration which closes 26 May. Don’t miss out because registration numbers are climbing fast. Conference is shaping up to be an exciting event and I am very much looking forward to seeing you in Rotorua 2-4 August. Click here to register.

During the holidays I attended the Te Rito Toi Twice Born Seed public lecture in Wellington. The event was a celebration of the arts in education and a call to action for a curriculum that has been undervalued in our schools.

I was privileged to be asked to speak on a panel about why the arts matter. Each member of the panel shared their perspective. It was good to see the Ministry of Education represented, because, as stewards of the system, the Ministry has a critical role to play in supporting schools to re-establish the arts.  It is a key pedagogy.

The Ministry, in line with the Tomorrow’s Schools Review, is establishing a Curriculum Centre. My expectation was that they would deliver not only a ‘curriculum refresh’ but the much-needed sector-based curriculum advisors in each curriculum discipline, especially in the arts. In addition, principals and teachers need a direct ‘plug-in’ to professional learning to ensure that nationally coherent arts leadership can change teacher practice and ultimately revitalise the arts.

I am sad to report that nothing of sort occurred. Rather, the Ministry reminded those attending that every school can already choose to revitalise the Arts. They indicated there was no targeted government funding to provide the advisory services necessary to help schools develop the Arts which has been absent from teacher practise for too long.

The Arts is a curriculum that receives about 4 hours of total tuition time in most initial teacher education (ITE) programmes.  This Arts tuition is not practice-based but delivered as a short series of lectures. How any beginning teacher learns to teach drama, dance, visual art, and music through lecture-based tuition is anyone’s guess.

In the arts, we have a curriculum that has been progressively squeezed out of teacher’s muscle memory not helped by the dominance of reading, writing, and mathematics over the National Standards years.

Schooling in New Zealand is currently confronted by several serious achievement challenges. A significant contributing factor has been the absence of expert teachers and principals in a curriculum advisory service to help guide and grow discipline-based expertise in curriculum.

In our highly decentralised system, we have become too atomised. The dissolution of curriculum advisory services in the early 2000s did not simply bring about the loss of discipline-based curriculum leadership but forced the loss of the associated pedagogical practices that enabled each curriculum subject.

The Ministry of Education’s current curriculum centre redesign appears focused on establishing a group of curriculum experts and rewriting curriculum. The glaring missing link is the national leadership of pedagogical practice and the associated reach through professional learning into schools and the learning of young people.

Given that the Ministry has been working up its redesign for some time now, I am ringing the alarm bells on this important change process. In a national system of education that is so heavily decentralised, it is simply unconscionable to take a hands-off approach to discipline centric curriculum and pedagogical leadership, particularly when we know it is time to strengthen teachers’ competence.

I spoke on TVNZ Breakfast on Monday alongside Professor Gavin Brown who commented on Minister Tinetti’s concern [expressed on Q&A] that our teachers lack confidence. His response was that ‘competence comes before confidence.’ I agree! We need our teachers to clearly know and understand the curriculum. Only then will they build confidence in their teaching and enable the learning of important discipline knowledge in a way that is engaging, creative, and effective.

Like other peak bodies [and I suspect the members of Bali Haque’s Tomorrow’s Schools Taskforce that recommended a Curriculum Centre], we are urgently waiting to hear more from the Ministry of Education about plans to revitalise the Advisory Services so that the teaching profession can once again be deeply knowledgeable in curriculum and skilful in the associated pedagogies.  

Calling for ‘fast testers’!
The Ministry of Education is looking for schools to be part of their Social Sciences Writing Group as ‘fast testers’ – testing early drafts of the Social Sciences learning area content in June and providing feedback directly to their specialist content writers.

This would require you or a member of your school’s leadership team attending an introductory Zoom session, before running a workshop with your kaiako and teachers to discuss the draft curriculum and complete an online survey giving us your feedback – this should take about 1 hour. The Ministry expects that fast testing will take place in the last two weeks of June. Once feedback has been considered, the content will be further refined so it is ready for public engagement and feedback during term 3.

If you are interested in being involved in the fast testing, please email nationalcurriculum.refresh@education.govt.nz

Public Sector Pay Freeze
We note the Government’s announcement of a Public Sector pay freeze.
Given the significant challenges of principalship, this announcement comes as a shock. More than ever, strong principal advocacy on the terms and conditions of their own Collective Agreement is critical.

Principals did not do well in the last Collective Agreement round and the ACCORD parties have suffered inertia in achieving anything of consequence. U1 and U2 principals have been particularly disadvantaged.

To say that principals’ expectations of the next Collective Agreement round are sky high is an understatement.

Please think hard on what we expect Government to deliver within our Collective Bargaining round. We’ll be in touch very soon about how you can strengthen the hand of principals around the bargaining table.

Ngā manaakitanga

Perry Rush
perry@nzpf.ac.nz