Source: Radio New Zealand
Education Minister Erica Stanford. RNZ / Mark Papalii
The country’s largest education union is describing a delay in the introduction of the government’s new curriculum as a significant win for teachers and school leaders.
The Ministry of Education has announced it will not mandate its new national curriculum for Years 0-8 until 2029.
Previously, the government wanted schools teaching the new science, social sciences, and health and physical education curricula for years 0-10 from 2027, and arts, technology and languages from the start of 2028.
The new curriculum for years 9-10 will still stick to that timeline.
The Ministry of Education said its new science and social science curricula would still “need” to be taught from 2027, but Educational Institute Te Riu Roa (NZEI) national secretary Stephanie Mills told RNZ, despite what the ministry said, those curricula would not be mandated until 2029.
“They’re saying that schools can start looking at the curriculum, trying it out between 2027 and 2028, but it won’t be mandated until 2029.”
That same year, schools would begin rolling out the new curricula for health and physical education, the arts, technology and learning languages, NZEI said.
Principals and teachers across the country had united against the new curriculum’s criteria and timeline, and would be “very pleased” to see Education Minister Erica Stanford had listened to their concerns, Mills said.
“We’ve had submissions, we’ve had letters, we’ve had select committee hearings, we’ve had conversations with the minister and ministry for months now, so I think the fact that there’s been a back down is very belated, but welcome.”
The delay was significant, because it would give teachers more time to learn the curriculum themselves, before they had to teach it, she said.
“They need to learn things themselves in order to be able to teach well and that is a process. It can’t happen in six minutes or six months across six new learning areas.
“The fact that they’ve now got two years to unpack their curriculum, get to know it, work out how it works for the children and the year levels they teach, work out how to make it personalised to the children in front of them is really important.”
On it’s website, the Ministry of Education said the full and final curriculum would be available to schools from mid-2026.
“Schools that are ready to start using it earlier can do so then,” it said.
Mills hoped Stanford and the Ministry for Education would keep listening to the sector.
“There is still concern about the content of the curriculum,” she said. “It’s very Eurocentric, it’s very overstuffed with facts and is focused on instruction from the front of the class, rather than building children’s understanding of how the world works.”
She was concerned that the framework of Te Tiriti o Waitangi had been “erased” from the new documents.
Where the old curriculum had asked students to “know, understand and do”, the new curriculum had dropped the “understand”, she said.
“The really critical things we need to develop in our students is the ability to analyse, to critique, to question… so that they’re questioning whether it’s AI, whether it’s legitimate, whether it’s valid information, whether they can triangulate it with what they know already.”
The Ministry for Education declined to comment, when approached by RNZ.
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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand