Kia ora e te whānau

This week, after writing to the Secretary for Education, I spoke publicly expressing concern about falling rates of achievement particularly in mathematics and science.

Declining rates of achievement, as reported in the league tables of international assessments, prompt no discernible response from me, but the pattern of our own performance over time on those international assessments is troubling.  Even more concerning is the poor performance of our Year 8 students in our own trusted National Monitoring Study of Student Achievement (NMSSA).  Now that definitely has my attention. 

In 2018, in NMSSA Mathematics, 81% of Year 4 pupils achieved ‘at’ or ‘above’ curriculum expectations while 45% of Year 8 pupils achieved ‘at’ or ‘above’.

In 2018, in NMSSA Science, 94% of Year 4 pupils achieved ‘at’ or ‘above’ curriculum expectations while 20% of Year 8 pupils achieved ‘at’ or above’.

This data is concerning and we must raise a flag on the potential causes and likely responses.

I, like many principals, was pleased to see the New Zealand Curriculum (NZC) of 2007 replace the former curriculum which was crowded with objectives and did not support the relevance and engagement that has flourished under the revised curriculum of 2007. 

Some 13 years on it is time to set aside our wholesale love of the NZC and the local freedom it has given us, to ask some searching questions.

What has the intent of the NZC enabled and what, if anything, has that intent disabled?

The generic nature of the NZC was not a mistake or simple happenstance. The curriculum was purposely designed with a clear front end that spelt out the Principles, Values and Key Competencies and a back end that had generic Learning Areas with associated Essence Statements and generalised high level Achievement Objectives.

The purpose of such a design was to enable each school to establish the detail of ‘what is taught’ in partnership with their community and ‘construct’ curriculum with the students so that it reflected contexts that are meaningful to them.

Brave stuff!

However, any curriculum that is purposely designed to be generic to allow for localisation has the potential to struggle as a nationally coherent entity. 

The NZC is brilliantly conceived but the detail and resources to help inform the Learning Areas is absent and the implementation of the curriculum was crowded out by the diametrically opposed ideology of National Standards- a hugely damaging policy launched quickly on the heels of the NZC and which undermined the successful implementation of the NZC. 

Too greater emphasis on localisation and decentralisation without clear information about what learning cannot be left to chance risked the curriculum becoming devoid of the important ideas and approaches that bring coherence to any national system of education. 

Better describing the NZC is not a cry for a demanding, tight, regimented, outcome-based approach but for greater specificity that empowers teachers to design powerful student-centred teaching, knowing what it is that informs their teaching. Too many teachers are uncertain about what the curriculum requires of them. Holding clarity about teaching goals is key to being an effective teacher.

Ironically, the better we tool up teachers to clearly understand what the curriculum requires, the better they can design learning that reflects the nexus between intentional teaching goals and meaningful personalised student learning.

We must call out the flawed thinking that labels strong teacher intention and clear knowledge goals as somehow damaging of student agency. That is nonsense!

The risk of such a conversation is that it invites a binary response-some will interpret questions about a lack of specificity in the NZC, as a call for a detailed centralised curriculum. To do so would be a mistake.

There is a sweet spot, and it is our responsibility as practice-based leaders to find it. 

To this end I have met with the Ministry of Education this past week. I emphasised the appropriateness of principals providing strong advice on how the NZC can be successful and on changes necessary to achieve this.

We want to bring a strong professional voice to this conversation so that we can guide the Ministry of Education as they respond to our call for improved curriculum leadership.  

The Ministry of Education has accepted our invitation to work with NZPF to gather this important information from principals to help them see what changes are necessary and in what areas of the curriculum.

There are also important discussions to be had about the effectiveness of our market driven PLD model and the value of a powerful sector enabled curriculum advisory service.

I will meet again with the Ministry of Education next week and inform you of our plan for progress. We need to move at pace to work up our advice.

In the meantime, there are some very interesting discussions in the media about future directions so do follow these on the NZPF facebook page. I for one am heartened that these conversations are taking place. They are well overdue.

Ngā manaakitanga

Perry Rush
perry@nzpf.ac.nz