spinofflive
Image: Tina Tiller
Image: Tina Tiller

OPINIONPoliticsMarch 24, 2023

KPIs are for businesses and boardrooms, not children and schools

Image: Tina Tiller
Image: Tina Tiller

National’s education policy reinforces an old-fashioned and hierarchical curriculum that does lasting harm to many students, writes educational specialist Dr Sarah Aiono.

Announcing the National Party’s new education policy this week, leader Christopher Luxon cited a recent NCEA pilot in which two-thirds of students were unable to meet the minimum standard in reading, writing, and maths.

Why is no one connecting the dots between the 15 and 16-year-olds completing this pilot and the same children being at the receiving end of the National-led government’s National Standards policy in its last term?

National Standards were held up as the answer to failing literacy and numeracy levels back in 2007-2008. By the time they were implemented and our curriculum narrowed, the teacher workforce was exhausted, and we were supposedly meant to have world-leading achievement in literacy and numeracy. The same students who started school then are now producing failing NCEA results.

Luxon mentions “knowledge” and ensuring children master the basics so that they can succeed in high school and beyond. International education research, however, stresses that it is not just “basic knowledge” that children need, but dispositions and executive functioning skills that will ensure their future success.

Yes, literacy and numeracy are important as foundation skills – but if we solely focus on these as a measure of a successful education sector we will be setting the bar too low when it comes to addressing the needs of our children.

National leader Chris Luxon announced his party’s education policy on Thursday. (Photo of Luxon speaking in January by Kerry Marshall/Getty Images)

A competencies-based curriculum – like the one we currently have – will ensure that children have the thinking skills and resilience to deal with an ever-changing world.

Countries considered world-leading, like Finland and other Nordic nations, have moved away from a “basics” approach and instead support an integrated, dispositional approach to learning.

If we instead model our education system on American and UK policies, we will develop narrow thinking and stressed students focused on sitting tests and exams (demonstrating knowledge). We will not have confident, self-assured learners.

‘If you value The Spinoff and the perspectives we share, support our work by donating today.’
Anna Rawhiti-Connell
— Senior writer

If students are taught to think through a narrow curriculum lens (such as the one Luxon is proposing) we won’t have the “out-of-the-box” thinkers we need to address the world’s mounting problems.

Luxon says that under National, the New Zealand curriculum will be rewritten to detail the non-negotiable knowledge and skills that primary and intermediate schools must cover each year in reading, writing, maths and science.

Education is not a business. You cannot create KPIs for children. Trying to do so would fly in the face of everything decades of research tells us about how children learn and develop.

‘Education is not a business. You cannot create KPIs for children.’ (Photo: Enzo Giordani/ Design: Tina Tiller)

The refreshed curriculum currently under construction is the most aligned with developmentally appropriate practice and neuroscience of any curriculum so far. It recognises that children do not make linear progress year on year, but rather stop, start, accelerate, rest, move two steps forward and one to the side – but always in an incrementally forward-moving progression.

Identifying yearly targets would simply narrow the ability of a teacher to respond to children’s unique developmental needs and stifle talents and strengths that sit outside of these “KPIs”.

Yes, you will get children who will shine in the areas that are identified as “non-negotiable” – if those areas are their strengths. But we also know the incredible damage it will do to children who do not shine in those areas if they do not have the time or permission to explore what they are good at. They will leave school disillusioned and with a sense of failure. These students will often have unrealised brilliant minds and abilities, thanks to a school system that doesn’t celebrate all areas of learning.

Luxon’s approach would only reinforce the antiquated hierarchy of subjects that has existed since the creation of the school system. This hierarchy serves to increase, not decrease, the social divide. It assumes that science and mathematics are the most important subjects, followed by literacy and places other subjects, such as the humanities and the arts at the bottom of this pyramid of learning.

This often means that students who have talents and abilities in these areas do not get time to explore these because they are not deemed as important as the basics to which Luxon refers. Indigenous knowledge (mātauranga Māori) is also placed at the bottom as a novelty, rather than being seen as an important part of a New Zealand curriculum.

The last three years have seen teachers manage lockdowns and online learning and shifts to hybrid learning, while managing the isolation requirements of both their students and their own families. Then throw in weather events. All while navigating a nearly six-year curriculum-refresh process under the current government.

Our teachers are navigating the cost of living crisis and living in some parts of the country on the equivalent of the minimum wage, while working 60-70 hours a week.

This year, the current government is shifting into the implementation of the refreshed curriculum, requiring ongoing professional development be undertaken to ensure the new curriculum is understood and implemented as intended.

Luxon wants to do this all again if National gets in? Read the room. Teachers are spent.

Teachers need the time to be able to teach as they know how to do. They need time to spend with their kids engaged in quality teaching and learning. They need time (ie, the human resources and financial support) to address the enormous social inequities in their classrooms that spill over into their ability to teach. They need time to spend with their families, to rest and recuperate, so they can be the best professionals in front of the kids every day, every week. And, they need money to do this too! They don’t need to be in a line to collect food from the food bank, or worry about mortgage payments – which many are now doing.

In countries that are considered world-leading in education, teachers are paid well, recognised as the professionals they are, and trusted to do their jobs.

Don’t change the playing field. Just adequately resource our teachers to do what they know needs doing.

Keep going!
Mayor Wayne Brown and principal advisor Jenny Marcroft (right) set up the first Auckland Council meeting. (Photo: Jason Dorday/Stuff)
Mayor Wayne Brown and principal advisor Jenny Marcroft (right) set up the first Auckland Council meeting. (Photo: Jason Dorday/Stuff)

OPINIONPoliticsMarch 24, 2023

Aaron Hawkins: Auckland Council has turned its back on the rest of the country

Mayor Wayne Brown and principal advisor Jenny Marcroft (right) set up the first Auckland Council meeting. (Photo: Jason Dorday/Stuff)
Mayor Wayne Brown and principal advisor Jenny Marcroft (right) set up the first Auckland Council meeting. (Photo: Jason Dorday/Stuff)

At a time when our need for collective action is stronger than ever, Auckland Council has opted out to save each of its residents just 25c a year, writes former Dunedin mayor Aaron Hawkins.

I grew up in rural Southland, in the shadows of the Cut The Cable movement. In 1992 we huddled together to conserve locally generated energy to help power the North Island. We all did our bit (even if some of us were a wee bit bitter about it). 

One of the strengths of our society is the idea of us all pitching in, to make sure that help is available to those who need it. A big part of this is the tacit acknowledgment that those with the means to do so will support those that don’t, and that those respective fortunes can change. 

We do it as a country by way of taxes, and as towns, cities and districts by way of rates. But we also do it between towns, cities and districts. 

When Wairoa was battling with commercial forestry companies over their rating method, and when Queenstown Lakes was staring down the barrel of leaky homes liability, who did they turn to for help? Local Government New Zealand.

Who spent $60,000 supporting Auckland Council’s defence in the Supreme Court when its targeted rate for accommodation was challenged? Also LGNZ. 

Local government doesn’t always win these arguments, but it always stands a better chance when it goes in to bat as a team. 

Civil defence emergencies – the likes of which we’ve recently seen, and that we know we’ll see more frequently – are another great leveller. Dunedin City Council sent staff up to Auckland to help with the flood cleanup. LGNZ coordinated efforts around the country so that communities not affected by Cyclone Gabrielle could support those that had been. 

They did that because they saw themselves as part of a collective local government family. 

The message they got back from Auckland Council yesterday when they voted to exit LGNZ is clear – don’t expect any help in return. 

wayne brown among a sea of emoji faces and microphones
Wayne Brown was the deciding vote and voted to leave (Image: Archi Banal)

What does this mean for the rest of us? Membership fees for LGNZ are set depending on your population (Auckland’s somewhere between $350,000 to $400,000 a year), but so are its voting rights. It is a democratic, membership-based organisation, but Auckland Council has (had) a far bigger say than any one else on the floor of the AGM. LGNZ presidential elections have been won and lost on Auckland’s support. 

Subscriptions only made up a fraction of LGNZ’s revenue last year – with Auckland’s contribution a significant chunk of that – so while it is far from a fatal blow it will certainly mean doing less, at a time when demands on local government have never been higher. 

And this is where the collateral damage is felt most keenly. 

The larger metro councils all have significant policy departments, and can respond under their own steam to the government’s legislative programme. This is true of any government, but especially the reformist zeal of the current one, including water reform, resource management reform, and the future for local government work. 

Smaller councils don’t have that luxury. They don’t have the population base to support those staff, but they can rely on LGNZ as a policy shop. They can then either support those submissions, in the case of Select Committee processes, or amend them to suit more easily because the ground work has been done. 

A small part of that 25c or so each Aucklander pays in to LGNZ a year goes to making sure a range of voices – urban, suburban, provincial, rural – are heard by central government, or by wider stakeholder organisations, on the issues of the day. That is the sort of work that has been put at risk yesterday, but the irony here is that it isn’t all one-way traffic. 

As councillor Andy Baker argued in debate, Auckland has rural communities within its boundaries, but its political focus is largely urban. His constituents in Franklin benefit from the advocacy of the rural and provincial sector that comes as part of their LGNZ membership. (As an aside, the right-leaning Baker’s support for membership showed that this wasn’t a debate along partisan lines. The mayor’s camp included Auckland’s quasi-environmental barnacle Wayne Walker.)

In my nine years of involvement I found LGNZ to be an increasingly useful organisation to be a part of, especially in its support for Māori, Pasifika and younger elected representatives – groups tragically under-represented on local councils. Those mutually beneficial connections – between Auckland and the rest of the country – will now be lost. 

It was also instrumental in setting up the Local Government Funding Agency, which has allowed Auckland the ability to borrow money cheaply. And it offers the sector as a whole the opportunity to approach professional development and advocacy together. 

Local government is united in its view that we need different funding and financing tools, something Auckland is acutely aware of right now, but this will always be an easier pitch to make to government as a collective.  

A collective that is always stronger than the sum of its parts, but is certainly all the weaker for the decision taken yesterday. 

Aaron Hawkins is a former mayor and councillor of Dunedin City. He has served on the National Council of LGNZ; on its Policy Advisory Group; and was an inaugural Co-Chair of its Young Elected Members Network. 

‘Become a member to help us deliver news and features that matter most to Aotearoa.’
Lyric Waiwiri-Smith
— Politics reporter
But wait there's more!