School daze: Sweeping changes planned for NZ’s education system
From the archives: Education Minister Erica Stanford has unveiled a list of six priorities in education, arguing the sector needs “fundamental” change. She told the country: “I’m putting ambition, achievement and outcomes at the heart of our education system,” she said. Earlier this year, Danyl McLauchlan looked at how the new government plans to make our kids top of the class once again. We revisit that article here.
In leafy Karori, high in the hills above Wellington, sits a cluster of derelict buildings surrounded by construction fences and razor wire. This was once a modern, architectural award-winning campus built in the 1960s when the old Wellington Teachers’ Training College, founded in the 1880s, relocated from Kelburn. It was one of the largest education colleges in the country, from which tens of thousands of teachers graduated over the decades.
In 2005, the college was merged with Victoria University of Wellington, which paid the government a nominal fee of $10 for the campus and subsequently sold it to Ryman Healthcare for $28 million. Victoria shifted teacher training to its Kelburn campus, downsizing it along the way.
Last year, the education faculty was nearly closed until a last-minute cash injection from the government kept it alive. But its former classrooms in Karori are piles of rubble overrun with weeds; the remaining buildings hollowed out, the windows shattered, walls covered in graffiti.
In 2004, graduates from the old college would teach in one of the finest public school systems in the world. The second round of Pisa rankings – the Programme for International Student Assessment, an OECD study comparing education systems across developed and developing nations – released in 2004 scored New Zealand students fifth in the developed world at reading and 11th in mathematics. The subsequent science study ranked New Zealand seventh highest.
The pay was good: teacher salaries declined during the 1990s, leading to staff shortages, but the Clark government agreed to a series of pay rounds and by the mid-2000s they were 1.6 times higher than the average wage.
Not everything was perfect – a troubling number of young people left school without any qualifications, a group in which Māori and Pasifika students were over-represented. But the government pledged that its sweeping changes to the education system – the introduction of the National Certificate of Educational Attainment (NCEA), a new national curriculum, and merging the teachers’ colleges with the universities – would address these problems, creating a new, 21st-century system in which all students flourished.
Twenty years later, new teaching graduates enter a system in crisis. There is another staffing shortage: in 2023, some schools in Auckland were forced to ask students to stay home because of lack of staff, and this is expected to worsen this year. New Zealand’s number of teachers per capita across state and integrated schools has declined, slowly and steadily, for two decades.
The Post-Primary Teachers Association (PPTA) estimates that the latest rounds of pay increases will raise salaries to 1.56 times the average wage.
School attendance levels have been trending down since 2011. In term two of that year, 69% of students were present for more than 90% of half-days (they missed less than one full day every two weeks on average). By term two of 2023, that was 47%. This decline occurs across all regions, deciles, genders and ethnicities – although it is worse for Māori and Pasifika students (about a third are attending regularly) and those from low-income households (26% under the old deciles 1-3 categories).