Latest news with #CouncilforEducationalResearch
Scoop
22-07-2025
- Politics
- Scoop
What You Need To Know About Recent Changes To Schools And Education
Explainer – It's been a busy year so far for education policy, with a series of announcements by the government and curriculum changes. Here's the biggest changes so far. RNZ Online Explainer – It's been a year full of changes in the educational system, with announcements and new initiatives coming nearly every week from the coalition government. What has been announced and what's coming up soon? Here is a roundup of just some of the major announcements we've seen in 2025 that will affect students and educators: New curriculum changes kick off The new maths curriculum and English curriculum for primary school-aged students began this year. It's all part of the first steps in the government's long-term push for what it's calling a 'knowledge-rich' curriculum. The government also previously announced moves towards teaching structured literacy skills to students. The drafts of the secondary English and maths curriculums are also out for feedback. Open plan classrooms on the way out The government announced it would no longer build open-plan classrooms, moving away from the policy which Education Minister Erica Stanford called too noisy and distracting for children. While there has been negative feedback from schools on open-plan learning, Stanford said, surveys by the Council for Educational Research showed most teachers who worked in the structures liked them and believed their students benefited from learning in that kind of environment. New classrooms will be built using standard designs that prioritise flexibility, like glass sliding doors that can open a class when it is time to collaborate and close it for focused learning. New school attendance service announced The government is also allocating $140 million to tackle truancy with a new school attendance service. The funding boost is aimed at supporting more schools and reaching double the number of students over the next four years, according to Associate Education Minister David Seymour. He said the new attendance service would address chronic absence and focus on keeping students in school when they return. Transitioning to the new attendance service would start at the end of the year and be fully in place from early 2026. The return of charter schools Charter schools have returned to New Zealand this year under the coalition government. They were previously shut down by former Education Minister Chris Hipkins in 2018. Seven of the publicly-funded, private schools opened in Term 1. The Charter School Agency said the charter school authorisation board was considering 52 applications from organisations wanting to set up new charter schools next year, as well as two applications from state or state integrated schools wanting to convert. New school property entity set up A new school property entity is being set up to manage building, maintaining, and administering the school property portfolio. Stanford said the new Crown agent will sit separate from the Ministry of Education, which will keep responsibility for education policy and network decisions. Announcing the launch of the New Zealand School Property Agency, Stanford said schools had been kept waiting for classrooms and refurbishments they badly needed. A new 600-student primary school was also announced for Massey in Auckland. Funding for more Māori immersion school classrooms The government announced $28 million will be spent on building more 'safe, warm and dry classrooms' for tamariki in Māori full immersion schools. Twenty new classrooms will be built across four providers, and work will begin on the first stage of a new school north of Auckland. The new development, for Te Kura Kaupapa Māori o Ngāringaomatariki in Kaiwaka, will eventually have 19 classrooms. Kāhui Ako education scheme ends It was announced in this year's budget that the Kāhui Ako – Communities of Learning – scheme was to be disestablished. The scheme grouped schools together to work on common problems with extra pay for one principal to oversee each group and for select teachers to share good practice between and within schools. A report said there were 220 Kāhui Ako, involving 1958 schools and 1506 early learning centres, and more than 4000 teachers received extra pay for Kāhui Ako roles. Changes to international student work rights From November, eligible student-visa holders will be able to work more hours a week, from 20 to 25 hours, and work rights will be extended to all tertiary students in approved exchange programmes. The government will also consider introducing a short-duration work visa of up to six months to allow international graduates who do not qualify for post-study work rights time to seek jobs under the Accredited Employer Work Visa (AEWV) pathway. It would also look at updates to make it easier for students to apply for multi-year visas. The goal was to boost tertiary education's annual economic contribution to $7.2 billion, by lifting enrolments from 83,700 in 2024 to 119,000 in 2034. May's budget sees major changes There were several big spending announcements in this year's budget. Stanford said new education initiatives in the Budget totalled $2.5 billion over four years, though about $614m of that total was reprioritised from 'underperforming' initiatives. The government's total spend on early childhood and school education would grow by roughly $400m to $19.85b in 2025-26, but drop to $19b and $18.9b in subsequent years. There was also a $720m increase for learning support. The increase included $266m to extend the early intervention service from early childhood through to the end of Year 1 of primary school, including employing 560 more early intervention teachers and specialists and helping an additional 4000 children. It also included $192m over three years to provide learning support coordinators in 1250 more primary schools, $122m to meet increased demand for the Ongoing Resourcing Scheme for students with the highest needs, and $90m to build 25 new satellite classrooms for specialist schools. Stanford said the government was building up to adding 2 million extra teacher aide hours by 2028. The other big education initiative in the Budget was $298m for curriculum, nearly half of it targeted to maths and literacy, and about $76m for a new standardised reading, writing and maths test for schools.
Scoop
22-07-2025
- Politics
- Scoop
What You Need To Know About Recent Changes To Schools And Education
Explainer - It's been a year full of changes in the educational system, with announcements and new initiatives coming nearly every week from the coalition government. What has been announced and what's coming up soon? Here is a roundup of just some of the major announcements we've seen in 2025 that will affect students and educators: New curriculum changes kick off The new maths curriculum and English curriculum for primary school-aged students began this year. It's all part of the first steps in the government's long-term push for what it's calling a "knowledge-rich" curriculum. The government also previously announced moves towards teaching structured literacy skills to students. The drafts of the secondary English and maths curriculums are also out for feedback. Open plan classrooms on the way out The government announced it would no longer build open-plan classrooms, moving away from the policy which Education Minister Erica Stanford called too noisy and distracting for children. While there has been negative feedback from schools on open-plan learning, Stanford said, surveys by the Council for Educational Research showed most teachers who worked in the structures liked them and believed their students benefited from learning in that kind of environment. New classrooms will be built using standard designs that prioritise flexibility, like glass sliding doors that can open a class when it is time to collaborate and close it for focused learning. New school attendance service announced The government is also allocating $140 million to tackle truancy with a new school attendance service. The funding boost is aimed at supporting more schools and reaching double the number of students over the next four years, according to Associate Education Minister David Seymour. He said the new attendance service would address chronic absence and focus on keeping students in school when they return. Transitioning to the new attendance service would start at the end of the year and be fully in place from early 2026. The return of charter schools Charter schools have returned to New Zealand this year under the coalition government. They were previously shut down by former Education Minister Chris Hipkins in 2018. Seven of the publicly-funded, private schools opened in Term 1. The Charter School Agency said the charter school authorisation board was considering 52 applications from organisations wanting to set up new charter schools next year, as well as two applications from state or state integrated schools wanting to convert. New school property entity set up A new school property entity is being set up to manage building, maintaining, and administering the school property portfolio. Stanford said the new Crown agent will sit separate from the Ministry of Education, which will keep responsibility for education policy and network decisions. Announcing the launch of the New Zealand School Property Agency, Stanford said schools had been kept waiting for classrooms and refurbishments they badly needed. A new 600-student primary school was also announced for Massey in Auckland. Funding for more Māori immersion school classrooms The government announced $28 million will be spent on building more "safe, warm and dry classrooms" for tamariki in Māori full immersion schools. Twenty new classrooms will be built across four providers, and work will begin on the first stage of a new school north of Auckland. The new development, for Te Kura Kaupapa Māori o Ngāringaomatariki in Kaiwaka, will eventually have 19 classrooms. Kāhui Ako education scheme ends It was announced in this year's budget that the Kāhui Ako - Communities of Learning - scheme was to be disestablished. The scheme grouped schools together to work on common problems with extra pay for one principal to oversee each group and for select teachers to share good practice between and within schools. A report said there were 220 Kāhui Ako, involving 1958 schools and 1506 early learning centres, and more than 4000 teachers received extra pay for Kāhui Ako roles. Changes to international student work rights From November, eligible student-visa holders will be able to work more hours a week, from 20 to 25 hours, and work rights will be extended to all tertiary students in approved exchange programmes. The government will also consider introducing a short-duration work visa of up to six months to allow international graduates who do not qualify for post-study work rights time to seek jobs under the Accredited Employer Work Visa (AEWV) pathway. It would also look at updates to make it easier for students to apply for multi-year visas. The goal was to boost tertiary education's annual economic contribution to $7.2 billion, by lifting enrolments from 83,700 in 2024 to 119,000 in 2034. May's budget sees major changes There were several big spending announcements in this year's budget. Stanford said new education initiatives in the Budget totalled $2.5 billion over four years, though about $614m of that total was reprioritised from "underperforming" initiatives. The government's total spend on early childhood and school education would grow by roughly $400m to $19.85b in 2025-26, but drop to $19b and $18.9b in subsequent years. There was also a $720m increase for learning support. The increase included $266m to extend the early intervention service from early childhood through to the end of Year 1 of primary school, including employing 560 more early intervention teachers and specialists and helping an additional 4000 children. It also included $192m over three years to provide learning support coordinators in 1250 more primary schools, $122m to meet increased demand for the Ongoing Resourcing Scheme for students with the highest needs, and $90m to build 25 new satellite classrooms for specialist schools. Stanford said the government was building up to adding 2 million extra teacher aide hours by 2028. The other big education initiative in the Budget was $298m for curriculum, nearly half of it targeted to maths and literacy, and about $76m for a new standardised reading, writing and maths test for schools.
RNZ News
21-04-2025
- General
- RNZ News
Fears new teacher maths requirement will halve enrolments, worsen shortages
Photo: RNZ / Richard Tindiller Teacher education providers warn there is strong evidence the timing of a new maths test for would-be primary teaching students will halve enrolments in some courses, worsening teacher shortages. The Literacy and Numeracy for Adults Assessment Tool (LNAAT) will become a pre-requisite for entry to one-year English-medium postgraduate programmes next year, and for multi-year programmes such as Bachelor's degrees in 2027. Students who enrolled this year in English-medium primary teaching courses would have to pass the one-hour test, which was developed for the Tertiary Education Commission and administered by the Council for Educational Research, before they graduated. The change was prompted by the government's push to raise maths achievement. Lecturers told RNZ the LNAAT was a good measure of teachers' maths ability but making it a condition of entry rather than requiring students pass the test during their course of study was a mistake. Their fears were based on Otago University's 15-year history of using the LNAAT with its students. Otago's associate dean of initial teacher education, Naomi Ingram, said the test's content was very close to the knowledge primary school teachers required and much closer than the requirements of NCEA Level 2 maths which was originally expected to be the benchmark for entry. But she said requiring students pass the test before they were accepted to a teacher education programme was a bad idea. "We've got 15 years of data to show that the first time they attempt this assessment our primary teachers in our initial teacher education programme, about half of them pass it," Ingram said. "Some of these people might be older students who just haven't done fractions for a while or there might be people that have genuine gaps in their knowledge. "It's going to have a massive impact on teacher supply and teacher supply is a problem in primary so I'm very concerned about that." Ingram said by the end of Otago's three-year degree all students who successfully completed all other aspects of the programme passed the test, though some required tuition or resources to get there. She said students enrolled in one-year, postgraduate teaching courses tended to do a lot better in the test. Ingram said students tended to struggle most with "proportional reasoning" involving fractions, finding percentages, place values and metric conversion. Education Ministry figures showed in recent years more than half of the graduates from primary teaching programmes were from Bachelor's degree programmes and in 2023, the most recent year for which statistics were available, the figure was 70 percent. Anthony Fisher from Early Childhood New Zealand Te Rito Maioha said its degree students would attempt the test next semester but students in its one-year programme had already sat it, with most passing. Fisher said the high pass rate was probably because the one-year students already had a degree. "They've come in with a prior degree so their level of mathematics is probably at a different level to some people coming into a three-year programme," he said. Fisher said making the test an enrolment requirement would lower student numbers. "As an entry requirement it's definitely going to have an impact on students. I think particularly a number of students who have I suppose what we could term maths anxiety," he said. "It will be a definite barrier I think for some students coming into primary teaching." The chair of universities' Council of Deans of Education, Joce Nuttall from the University of Canterbury said universities had pre-entry literacy and numeracy tests for years and its members "absolutely support" the need for graduates to be mathematically competent. Nuttall said students who failed the test on their first attempt this year would get extra support and the university was confident all students would pass it before graduation. "What we're more concerned about is that students who have to sit the test before they get into teacher education from next year. If they don't pass the test we may lose them," she said. Nuttall said deans of education hoped the Teaching Council would change the rules. "We'd really like to see the test incorporated within our courses rather than something that's required prior to entry. That would bring us in line with very similar testing systems in Australia," she said. The Teaching Council said the decision to make the test a prerequisite for enrolment was reached after consultation. It said candidates would be allowed two attempts at the assessment, the second time a month after the first. In addition, providers could seek exemptions allowing them to offer post-entry assessment for candidates who met conditions such as being strong candidates in other respects. "Partly due to these mitigations, we expect that the mathematics requirement is likely to have only a modest impact on supply of candidates entering English-medium primary ITE programmes," it said. "We will, however, work with the Ministry of Education as the mathematics entry requirement policy is implemented to achieve the best possible understanding of teacher supply impacts and we will consider changes to the policy settings if needed." The council said it initially considered allowing entry for students who had NCEA maths credits at Level 2. "Concerns were, however, raised by sector experts about unintended consequences from the use of this measure. In addition, we had already identified that another assessment would need to be available since it would not be fair or possible to rely solely on a candidate's school record," it said. Sign up for Ngā Pitopito Kōrero , a daily newsletter curated by our editors and delivered straight to your inbox every weekday.
