Kerre Woodham: Everyday children deserve support and encouragement

This particular pre-Budget announcement should be music to the ears of parents who are currently working every hour God sends to pay for extra maths coaching for their children. You might have heard them on this show before – parents who really can't afford it, but say to themselves they can't afford not to, pay for the sort of tuition that teachers are unable to give in school, that one-on-one coaching to fix the gaps in literacy and in maths. Core subjects that teachers should be able to teach and should have time to provide extra support for those children who needed a little bit of a catch up, but in the modern-day classroom environment, it appears they cannot.  

Next week's Budget will include nearly $100 million in funding over four years for students who are underachieving in maths, including $56 million for the equivalent of 143 “maths intervention teachers” in primary schools. I didn't know we had a “maths intervention” tree, but it will be fantastic to pick 143 teachers off there and pop them in the classrooms. Perhaps they'll come out of the after-school tuition programmes. 

From next year, all students will have their maths ability checked in their first two years of schooling, which is fantastic. You have to know where you're coming from, you have to have a base from which you can start. Education Minister Erica Stanford said the maths check scheme would cost $4 million and aims to identify students who need more support, similar to the literacy phonics check unveiled last year, which is going, by all accounts, great guns. So that's $100 million that we've got, that's $56 million spent on the maths intervention teachers, $4 million for the maths check scheme, and according to my maths, that leaves us $40 million that will fund small group maths tutoring for up to 34,000 year  7 & 8 students each year, from next year. Hell-ay-jolly-lujah!   

As I say, parents are trying to shore up the gaps in their children's maths education by enrolling them and after school tuition at considerable expense will be absolutely delighted. Are the teachers? Thank you for asking. According to Upper Hutt Principals Association president Robyn Brown on Early Edition this morning, not so much. 

“Unfortunately our problem doesn't sit in maths. We are desperate for learning support and if we want to improve achievement, we need to put every cent we have into learning support rather than ring fencing it just for maths. We know that that's not going to make a huge difference. At the moment we have inadequate PLD or professional development for teachers. On a curriculum that they've only had two terms to teach so far, it's not been implemented with ability, we have no way of even assessing it yet.” 

It would be great if you could say $100 million investment in our classrooms is fantastic, but I guess you're not going to get that from Principal Associations and education ministries. They have been saying for some time, since Labour was in power, that they need more professional development. They need more time and there have been many, many changes within the schools around the curriculum, and I don't blame them for wanting to catch a breath, catch up with what this iteration of the curriculum looks like. But when she says math isn't the problem, that is the problem.  

In 2023, New Zealand students recorded their worst ever results in the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment. The average student dropped up to 15 points in maths, one of the worst performing. It's not a one-off. New Zealand's “achievement” in maths has plateaued for the past two decades. And then you had all this nonsense back in 2022, saying they get maths anxiety before tests, they're very anxious. They're actually brilliant at maths, they just get very anxious before exams. What tosh, absolute nonsense. They don't know the answers – that's where the anxiety comes from. They're not prepared; they don't know how to do it. Parents know this. They will welcome this investment even if the teachers don't, or the teachers' unions and representatives don't.  

When it comes to the learning difficulties, that surely is a separate matter entirely. Neurodiverse kids, kids who are behind the eight-ball from the time they were born because of the damage done in the womb, that is complex, it is difficult, but surely it's a completely separate issue. I'm not sure it should be conflated with your average school kid needing to do better in core subjects – children who are able to learn from a standard curriculum, who want to do better, who deserve better, who should be doing better. I'm sure there's a shopping list a mile long that any teacher or principal has when it comes to doing the best for the kids that turn up in their classroom. Too often your ordinary, everyday children are getting left behind and forgotten. They deserve the best. They deserve to be supported and encouraged and just see how far they can go, not have all the money spent on trying to deal with incredibly complex and difficult situations with families and children. How about a little support for these kids whose parents are doing the best by them, whose teachers are trying to do the best by them but they're getting dragged in so many different directions and situations?  

I'm all for this this. It’s fantastic. Have the base check, know which children are going to need the extra support, target it to them and hopefully, hopefully in a few years we won't have children leaving primary school who are illiterate and innumerate, because that has been a crying shame for the past two decades and that is only going to benefit New Zealand to have a better educated populace. 

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