28.11.2024
New Zealand’s education system needs a thorough overhaul to make it fit for purpose for children who will live into the 22nd century say researchers from University of Auckland think tank Koi Tū: The Centre for Informed Futures.
Dr Nina Hood and Victoria Macann, the authors of a new report Searching for utopia: what our education system must confront and what it could be, challenge traditional notions of schooling, saying a system devised more than a century ago doesn’t cut it today.
Koi Tū director Sir Peter Gluckman says the report marks the start of a significant body of work aimed at examining and addressing the long-term challenges and opportunities within New Zealand’s education system. The second report, due in early next year, will offer practical policy solutions.
“Schools are being asked to educate our young people for a more complex and uncertain world and to a growing extent are the primary point of intervention for the growing challenges facing young people in society. Yet they are doing this with largely the same infrastructure they had 50 and in some cases 100 years ago,” says Dr Hood.
Student success – or lack of it – shows the strain. Data from a range of sources show the academic performance of young New Zealanders is at best stagnating and at worst declining in reading, maths and science. OECD PISA testing of our 15-year-olds has found significant declines in median scores in each of those subject areas between 2012 and 2022.
The coalition government is beginning to make its mark on education, with changes including the introduction of structured literacy to lift reading achievement as well as a daily requirement of an hour’s teaching of reading, writing and maths. But such incremental change, although largely focused on “best practice” approaches, rarely touches the underpinning structures of schools or schooling, Dr Hood says.
“While these initiatives are grounded in the evidence and are much needed, it is also important that the government is simultaneously working long-term educational policy in order to address the persistent inequities that affect educational outcomes,” she says.
Evidence-based and carefully implemented initiatives have a place in educational improvement, and likewise individual schools and initiatives have made substantial progress in tackling inequities and driving student achievement. However, they are unlikely to achieve the transformational change that is needed.
The Koi Tū report says the very “grammar” of schooling – the design of the school year, the organisation of subjects, age-based cohorts, teachers as the primary personnel in schools, qualification systems – needs reviewing for the modern age.
“Schools no longer are just having to ensure young people develop the academic knowledge and skills they require for success in future work and social and civil life, which in themselves are much broader and more sophisticated than they used to be,” says Dr Hood.
“Increasingly they are required to take over broad social functions including supporting young people’s socio-emotional development, executive functioning, well-being and mental health. And yet currently, they are not supported or resourced to do this effectively at scale.”
The report says today’s world – with its greater diversity than 30 years ago of ethnicities, cultures, religions, gender identities, values and languages spoken – makes the need for future-oriented policy formation more pressing. It says the country needs to embark on long-term planning and policy development in education that takes account of the changes in society.
The authors note, however, that achieving this will be no mean feat given that policy-making in New Zealand is driven by the three-yearly electoral cycle meaning a focus on long-term reform is limited. Mechanisms must be put in place to ensure longer-term thinking and planning is embedded into policy decision-making.
“We will do our children and young people a substantial disservice if we continue to conceptualise schools only in the same ways we have over past generations, and our society will be poorer both socially and economically if we continue just to tinker,” Dr Hood says.
“It is clear the status quo is not achieving the holistic outcomes our young people need. It is incumbent on us, therefore, that long-term change is enacted. After all children are our best investment for the future.”
