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.

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 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.

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.