Education – NZ Initiative Out of Step with Modern Curriculum

Perry Rush, President of the New Zealand Principals’ Federation rejects the premise of the New Zealand Initiative report entitled New Zealand’s Education Delusion, in which the author, former British Maths teacher Briar Lipson, takes aim at child-centred teaching.

“The New Zealand Initiative has not kept up. The world has changed. We have moved beyond the tired old ideas of the pre-packaged standard curriculum designed to educate children as if they were empty vessels for us to fill,” said Rush. “Standardised curricula and assessment is a model, which after ten years in New Zealand, failed to lift the achievement of a single child,” he said.

“Our teaching professionals have a high degree of confidence in the NZ Curriculum. It is widely recognised as world class, enabling teachers to make curriculum relevant and engaging for our young people, so they can be active participants, taking control of their learning and solving their own problems, not passive recipients of selected bits of standardised knowledge to regurgitate in standardised assessments,” he said.

“Our inquiry-learning and competency-based teaching develops learner efficacy. That is a major strength of New Zealand’s schooling and does not result from a prescriptive curriculum,” he said.

“If the New Zealand Initiative is looking for a project, they might like to focus on something relevant to now like the inequities in our education system,” said Rush, “and why that is the case.”