Schooling and society

Families’ socioeconomic resources heavily influence educational achievement. This has been established since the mid1960s as an important causal factor in performance.

Families with good jobs, educated parents, warm and dry homes and access to reasonably priced healthcare produce children who do well at school. Since the 1990s, New Zealand has become a society increasingly unable to ensure such conditions for all children.

This means New Zealand is faced with a choice when looking at higherscoring societies for possible solutions. A cleareyed examination of those nations may give us some insight into what we could do.

Among the most successful are the hightesting regions of East Asia (Hong Kong, Singapore, China, Korea, Japan,