We start the year with a new, three-party-coalition government. Predictably, our new government has ushered in a suite of new education policies. So far, they include banning cell phones during school hours, reintroducing charter schools and teaching reading, writing and mathematics, for one hour each a day.
This column will examine just the ‘one hour a day of reading, writing and mathematics’ policy. That is not to say that the ‘cell phones away’ or ‘charter schools’ policies are not also important, but to do them justice, means they will be addressed in subsequent issues of New Zealand Principal.
To put it simply, ‘one hour a day of reading, writing and mathematics’ policy is all about improvement. We are sliding down the OECD’s PISA (Programme for International Student Achievement) ladder. We used to perch near the top – somewhere around the first five rungs. Now we do not. Our new Minister of Education wants us back up there, at least among the top ten, and has a plan. It is ‘Doing the Basics Brilliantly’.
Hon. Erica Stanford says the problem is that teachers in primary schools are not giving young people enough direct teaching time in reading, writing and mathematics. She quoted from the mathematics report prepared by the Royal Society in 2021, which said quite clearly that children in primary schools did not have enough direct teaching time in mathematics. Based on the reasoning that to improve results, children need more time being taught these subjects, from now on there will be one hour a day spent on each of these subjects. That doesn’t have to be one straight hour – as the Minister said, ‘I don’t expect that 5-year-olds would sit at a desk doing maths for an hour at a time.’ What it will be, however, is blocks of direct teaching that add up to an hour every day.
If you prescribe such a policy, then you want to know if it makes a difference. You need an assessment measure, and the Minister would prefer the same measure was used across the country, rather than giving schools a choice of assessment measures. That way, she said, she will know where to direct extra resource. You also need to monitor the teachers to make sure they are in fact teaching the full hour a day in these subjects and the Minister has suggested that ERO will take on that task.
The Minister is to be commended for her ambition to see all young people leave their primary school with a solid foundation of basic skills on which to build their future lives, and lift us back up that PISA ladder of success. The question is, can her ‘one hour a day’ policy achieve this aspiration?
Before embarking on the solution, it is useful to examine the problem. OECD data shows that our top performing students continue to perform well, although have dropped a little, as have, for example, Australian students. What singles out Aotearoa New Zealand is the gap between the high and low performers, and the fact that the number of low performers has grown. Simultaneously, the economic gap between the advantaged and disadvantaged in our country, has also grown. Just as we have more students in the low performing sector, we also have more families living in poverty. It is worth examining to what extent the growth in poverty has affected school achievement and whether it is education that needs a solution or poverty.
Other than the growth in poverty, there are a few other factors that might derail the hopes and dreams of our Minister. One of these is ensuring the quality of the one hour a day teaching. That is where ongoing professional learning comes into play. Professional Learning and Development (PLD) is a long-term weakness in our education system. It takes quality PLD to guarantee quality teaching. So far, the Minister has not committed a big injection of PLD resourcing to accompany her policy.
Next is learning support. As long as I have been writing editorials, principals have been pleading for more learning support resources in schools. Their anguished calls for help ring out unanswered. They watch their teachers struggle on; the unmet psychological, social, and emotional needs of their young ones overwhelm the most effective teaching every time. Unless the Minister is prepared to invest many more millions of dollars to provide the level of learning support needed, then the hour a day policy is unlikely to change much.
Thinking about effective teaching, it is very easy to adopt the argument that schools at which student achievement is high, have effective teachers and schools where student achievement is low, have ineffective teachers. This thinking is simplistic and does not take unmet learning support needs or socioeconomic factors into account. Recent research indicates that the socioeconomic status of a school’s catchment is a further mitigating factor in student success, despite how effective the teachers are.
We like to think that education can and will make a difference; that it is the answer to lifting people out of poverty and into prosperity. We all want our children to grow and flourish and live successful, happy lives. If only it was that simple.