Editorial

At a recent meeting with Erica Stanford, Opposition Spokesperson for Education, I was interested to learn more about the National Party’s thoughts around education. This meeting turned out to be more of a question and answer session, where Erica asked questions and keenly listened to the answers from the various stakeholders present. Of particular concern was the underperformance of students in Literacy and Science, and what steps needed to be put in place for trainee teachers to reverse these alarming trends.

This question was prompted by a recent report from the Education Hub: Now I don’t know my ABC, The perilous state of literacy in Aotearoa New Zealand (Part 3) by Nina Hood and Taylor Hughson, published Monday 21 March 2022.

Extracts from Part 3 Where to next? Schools must support the development of critical literacy, disciplinary literacy, literacy for knowledge acquisition, and literacy for the effective communication of ideas and information. It is this range of literacy abilities that will enable students to connect with different subject areas and different topics for a range of purposes. Not only do students need to be able to engage with complex texts and abstract concepts and ideas, with today’s complex digital media environments, they also require skills in navigation, comprehension, analysis and evaluation across multiple sources. Crucially, all of this needs to be done in culturally responsive and sustaining ways, which make use of culturally-relevant learning contexts and pedagogical approaches.

The work that our teachers are engaging with by developing the WHAT HOW WHY strategy is one way our college is helping to address this literacy shortfall to bring an element of consistency, and culturally responsive practice for these strategies across learning areas.

While it is good to have home grown solutions to areas of underperformance, it is also vital that New Zealand consider other education paradigms from around the world. Finland have long been seen as the benchmark for a world leading education system, but it was not always this way. Prior to 2001 education in Finland didn’t have an international reputation. Even the Finns themselves thought their education system was nothing special and expressed particular concerns about the quality of instruction in math and science in the 1980s and 1990s. Finland gained notoriety as a result of the publication of the first Program for International Student Assessment (or PISA) results in December 2001, which dramatically altered domestic as well as international opinion. PISA highlighted Finland’s academic excellence as well as equity of outcomes. Finland’s success stemmed from studying other education systems. New Zealand could take a feather from the Finnish cap by studying practices from other successful education systems from around the world. We could proactively focus on educational programmes that would help us tackle any potential skill shortages as we look to the future which is increasingly focusing on science and technology. The recent criticism of literacy and science practices in a child’s development should be a key strategic target.

What makes the Finnish education policies successful is that they are built around close cooperation with education authorities and teacher unions. The voices of other stakeholders— business leaders, nongovernmental associations, researchers, and parents—are always included in their development plans. I believe that a consensus-based policy-making process could guarantee sustainability of reforms and would be a refreshing change from the current top down pragmatic decision making model.

Finally, another key driver of education-development policy in Finland is that they have not endorsed student testing and school ranking as the path to improvement, but rather focused on teacher preparation and retention. The Finns support and endorse their teachers, which would be a very welcomed step in our education system today. Improving teacher qualifications is a start, but we still have a long road to travel if we are to become Finland’s equivalent in the southern hemisphere.