Kerre Woodham: Could this be the year education gets back on track?

Any day now, counting down the seconds, the kids will be back at school if yours haven't gone already. And this year, maybe, hopefully, fingers crossed, will be the year that our education system gets back on track.

Certainly, Erica Stanford’s bigging up the new focus on structured learning. A press release out from her office says, as schools start back for 2025, there will be a relentless focus on teaching the basics brilliantly so all Kiwi kids grow up the knowledge, skills and competencies needed to grow the New Zealand of the future.

A world leading education system is a key driver to economic growth. Our future playwrights and songwriters need to have a mastery of literacy and numeracy as much as our future mechanical engineers, doctors and electricians, and so on and so forth.

It's kind of a call to arms for teachers and parents from Erica Stanford.

There's also an op-ed piece from a math's and statistics teacher in the Herald this morning, Peter Wills. He says, and he's looking at the failure rates for NCEA Level 1, the news that Kiwi kids did poorly in NCEA comes as no surprise.

 Last month, NCEA results came out and we saw that in 2024 30% of students failed Level 1, slightly under a third of our kids could not pass basic numeracy and literacy tests associated with NECA Level 1. That was this 18% in 2023. Erica Stanford said the results were expected, that there’d be a high proportion of students who would not pass because they were putting in minimum standards.

Now most countries we compare ourselves to - United Kingdom, Ireland, Singapore, the US and Australia all have numeracy and literacy tests and these have been introduced because we know it's bad, but we need know how bad it is. 30% couldn't pass NCEA Level 1 last year.

So: If you don't have NCEA level 1, it's really difficult to get a decent job, to enter any kind of training. Just by passing NCEA Level 1 on average, a student earns $12K more a year and is significantly more likely to get a job and enter training. They’ve got more choices. You get an education, you have more choices. You don't have to be a brain surgeon you know, but you are still going to need basic numeracy, basic literacy to get any kind of job you want.

Getting students to pass the CAA S, which is the literacy and numeracy test is a top priority for schools across New Zealand, Peter Wills says. Mercifully, though he doesn't advocate dropping standards, which you can imagine other administrations might opt for to allow more young people to pass. He says maths teachers are adamant that the standard not be lowered to compensate for low pass rates.

You teach better, you teach differently. You give the kids the basic skills they need to pass. What we had before wasn't working and you know that, employers know that, parents know that.

That's why so many parents are spending thousands of dollars per child every year to shore up the gaps in their children's knowledge with private tuition, or sending them to private schools. They know the state education is, and has been, sub-standard, and it's not the fault of the teachers, it's the policy wonks in the Ministry of Education, whose half baked theories? Formulated over dinner parties in Kelburn, inexplicably and inexcusably made it into the classroom.

And for decades now our once world-famous education system has degraded to where it is now. 30% of kids last year not passing the most basic secondary school exam. So as we start the school year as we with a call to arms from Erica Stanford and structured learning is going to be the saviour – and let's hope it is.

When it comes to employers, what are you seeing coming out of our schools at the moment? According to Peter Wills, it will be seven years before we see any benefits from structured learning.

We've got concerns about our productivity, we’ve investors as you heard this morning, travelling New Zealand looking for bright young things with startup ideas. Where the hell are those bright young things going to come from if we don't embrace the structured learning and reclaim our world class education. 

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