Panel called in as pupils’ maths skills sink to a low

AUCKLAND: Compared with their overseas counterparts, New Zealand children are not cutting it in mathematics.

A panel has been called in by the Ministry of Education to improve pupils’ maths results, which have hit a low.

The decision to seek advice from a Royal Society of New Zealand panel looks likely to foreshadow a major shakeup of the curriculum and the way teachers are trained and supported across all subjects.

The rethink is starting with maths because the latest Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (Timss) survey found New Zealand pupils’ maths knowledge in the first year of high school was now below that in all other Englishspeaking countries and the lowest it had been.

‘‘If these sorts of results continue on with this trend, we’ll be looking at Third World results,” Massey University Distinguished Professor of Mathematics Gaven Martin, who will lead the panel, said.

‘‘A lot of highpaying jobs in important sectors are going to be data — and analytically driven — at a time when we are failing to achieve at OECD levels. So there is a real disjunct there,’’ he said.

‘‘Maths has this gatekeeping role to higherpaying jobs, by and large, so decisions made by teachers, by students, by parents even early in a child’s lifetime have pretty significant impacts further down the track.’’

The ministry called in the society after the New Zealand Principals’ Federation wrote to ministry head Iona Holsted last week calling for urgent action on maths.

Federation president Perry Rush said there was a ‘‘void’’ of leadership in maths education and schools were lost in a ‘‘soup’’ of competing maths programmes.

As well as the international study, he said the ministry’s own National Monitoring Study of Student Achievement (NMSSA) showed that only 45% of pupils in year 8 were achieving at the expected curriculum level in maths in 2018, and only 20% achieved the expected level in science in 2017.

‘‘That is a shocking statistic,’’ Mr Rush said.

‘‘For us in the federation, the question really is ‘Where is the conversation around how can we do better for young people in terms of maths?’, because it appears that every year we have seen a growing concern around our achievement results, and we do not have a response.

‘‘There is no response. We tolerate it.

‘‘The question from our national executive is, where is the leadership to develop the appropriate approaches that are coordinated, nationally agreed and that attack this issue?’’

He said teachers needed help with maths but were not getting it.

‘‘One of the problems is the number of new [primary teaching] graduates that have made comments that they didn’t want to be teaching years 6 to 8 because they didn’t feel that they had the maths capability to support the maths curriculum at that level,’’ he said.

Ministry early learning and pupil achievement deputy secretary Ellen MacGregorReid said the ministry was concerned about ‘‘the pattern of decline’’ in achievement and was considering ‘‘specific actions needed in particular areas of learning including socialemotional, literacy and mathematics’’.

‘‘A priority for us this year is developing a maths strategic plan.

‘‘We have commissioned a Royal Society Te Aparangiconvened independent academic paper on the mathematics knowledge and skills learners need to know, and when, and what needs to be changed in the NZ Curriculum to achieve this.

‘‘We will also be establishing a diverse group of sector practitioners to critique outcomes evidence, including Timss and NMSSA data, to help us understand and respond to practice and implementation challenges.’’

Prof Martin said the 11 ‘‘purely voluntary’’ members of the panel comprised ‘‘the leading people in mathematics education in the country’’.

‘‘The ministry wants something by the end of April.

‘‘Everybody we have spoken to has laughed when we said that, but I hope to have something around the middle of the year, perhaps slightly later,’’ he said. — The New Zealand Herald