How are our kids doing at school?
around overnight what’s been 20 years in the making. So the actions we’re taking look out 30 years and involve a conveyor belt of co-ordinated programmes and policies that collectively will make the difference.
The first major lever we’re pulling is to reset the environment schools operate in – the 30-year-old Tomorrow’s Schools system. The role of school boards will be refocused so that they will need to place as much emphasis on efforts to eliminate discrimination, stigma and bullying as they do on driving achievement.
The reset also recognises that schools aren’t the same. It sounds obvious, but the system hasn’t been anywhere near flexible enough. Some schools want a light touch from government and others need closer and more tailored support. The changes will put resources where they’re needed.
The changes we’re aiming to make to school enrolment zones will give all schools a better chance to succeed, but what they are more about is to effectively manage the rapid population growth we’re seeing in parts of the country. We’re also well under way with work to ensure students make a year’s worth of progress for a year’s worth of teaching. It involves building progress maps to enable teachers to know where students are at against a broad set of curriculum markers so that they know what to do next to build on that earlier learning.
We’re replacing the decile system with a more accurate, efficient and data-driven mechanism to target funding based on socioeconomic need, putting in place action plans to lift Ma¯ ori and Pasifika achievement and we’re adding trained coordinators into schools to help teachers with students with learning support needs.
And alongside all of our structural, policy and legislative changes, we’re making strides to fix the teacher shortage and ensure we’ve got a good supply of welltrained and supported teachers who have the tools – and critically – the time to teach.
Finally, education is a broad church. It’s a wide spectrum with traditionalists at the one end and progressives at the other, all of whom believe their formula works best. The key to the changes we’re making is to work hard to capture the best of each world view and bring the whole spectrum along.