Kerre Woodham: New Zealand's education system has been failing children for a long time

Yes, the maths. You know, I know we've been talking about this, that we have been failing our children for decades now.

This is not a previous Government issue, this is not of their making. This has been a long time coming.

Where New Zealanders used to assume a world class education as their birth right, where anybody who was educated in New Zealand could stand amongst the brightest minds in the world, now we've had successive generations of children falling behind in every metric.

The numbers have been there. But instead of using the international results that have consistently put us at the bottom or near the bottom of the class, the educators, the boffins who make decisions about what our kids learn and how they learn and what our teachers teach, have refused to accept that their ideology is flawed, that their experimentation with our children has failed.

Instead, they phaff around and say that testing is outmoded and an old patriarchal colonial construct, and not the best way to assess a child's abilities and the like. Utter, utter nonsense.

In 2021, the Ministry of Education commissioned a report on our math syllabus, in the face of two decades of slipping maths results, and that's by both international and national measures. So it asked a panel of independent experts convened by the Royal Society to look at the New Zealand Curriculum, which outlines what kids need to know and when, to see if it was fit for purpose.

The conclusion? Massey University distinguished Professor of Maths Gaven Martin, who was chair of the panel that wrote the report told the New Zealand Herald our maths education was a 'goddamn mess'. Pretty unequivocal. The system was widening the gap between rich and poor children and left Māori and Pasifika children falling behind at school and ultimately falling behind in life.

And you know it, and I know it. You'll have heard the calls from so many parents and grandparents who are paying through the nose to send children to private tuition companies, to either get their kids the education in maths that they're not getting at school, or to give them the extra stimulus because they're good at maths and want to be better, that overworked and underprepared teachers simply cannot give them.

So Labour knew there was something wrong under Helen Clark, and National knew under John Key, and Labour knew under Jacinda Ardern, and now this coalition Government knows that there is something terribly wrong with how we're teaching our kids.

Christopher Luxon has moved to introduce structural maths for students 0-8 a year earlier than intended, after new data showed just 22 percent of Year 8 students in New Zealand reached the benchmark for maths. That's the bare minimum. And only 22 percent of them reached that benchmark. He said it amounts to a crisis - and Minister for Education Erica Stanford told Mike Hosking she agrees.

"We've compared ourselves to other countries who are doing a much better job than us, who have been actually climbing the ranks in the OECD, whereas we've been dropping for many, many years and I don't believe for a second that there are some people who just can't do math. That is completely untrue."

"Everybody can do maths. It's just the confidence and having wonderful teachers and great curriculum and great resources. And we've seen other countries like Singapore and Australia and the UK surge ahead because they have those things right and we don't and we are going to get them right under this Government."

"And I tell you what, I have been around the country for the last couple of years talking with principals of high schools and primary schools, and they all agree that we have a massive problem in maths. Nobody agrees with the Union apart from the Union, and I don't think we should be listening to them. High school principals tell me when I walk in the door, Erica, the first thing we have to do with our year nines or our third formers is teach them their timetables because they don't know them. Without fail, every high school I go in to. So there is a problem and the unions can have their heads in the sand but I'm going to move on despite that and implement our plan because it has to happen."

It really, really does. We've talked about it for far too long. The leader of the Academy report back in 2021 said the real issues went beyond the curriculum to the heart of how New Zealand educates its students, which ranged from insufficient teacher knowledge to a system that labels kids too early in life and doesn't give them the same chance to succeed.

It said there needs to be a real shake-up, but there's doubts that there is the political will. Currently teachers and schools have to pick and choose from a myriad of options for both professional development and curriculum resources, and that is true across many, many lessons, many subjects.

So if you want to learn history, you make up your own lesson plan, basically, based on the resource material that's there, it's a lucky dip, a pick and mix. And that's for all the lessons.

The report calls for the Ministry of Education to show more leadership in many areas, including giving all schools access to the right resources, upskilling teachers and attracting maths specialists to the profession. All of that would be fantastic.

And yet, the Education Ministry employed 1704 more staff in 2023 than it did in 2016. So the addition of 1704 more staff did exactly what for our kids?

It is so, so hard. If you struggled at school yourself, you were one of the first generation to be failed by New Zealand's education system, you have children yourself. You see that they're struggling.

How frustrating to feel powerless to be able to help them, to see them following in your footsteps and be denied opportunities that you were denied because the education system failed first them and now you. And that is just heartbreaking. And you can't afford it.

Your cousin might be married to an incredibly successful chap or woman, who have their own incredibly successful company, and all three of their children go to a private tuition company which costs them thousands of dollars a year.

And that's okay, they can shore up the gaps in their knowledge because they can afford it. But you can't. You simply can't.

So your kids continue to fall behind while the kids who can afford the tuition get the gaps in their knowledge shored up, and that is damn wrong. So wrong. It goes against everything I believe about this country and everything I believe about education.

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