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EDUCATION REVIEW VOL 9. ISSUE 1 2018 $15.00

SCHOOL FOCUS TARAWERA HIGH SCHOOL’S TRANSFORMATIVE JOURNEY

INCLUSIVE EDUCATION

WHERE ARE WE GOING WRONG?

TE REO

WHY MAKING IT COMPULSORY IN SCHOOLS WON’T WORK NZ TEACHER

TEACHER WORKLOAD

BURIED IN PAPERWORK

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GO TO EDUCATIONREVIEW.CO.NZ Education Review’s print edition is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to in-depth coverage of education in New Zealand.

2018 – the year of change In this issue is a somewhat quirky speculation piece looking at a futurist’s claims that teacherless education is not far away. While arguably not the most inspiring thing for a teacher to read on their first week back at school, it does stop and make us think about the changing nature of education. Change is the key word for 2018. This year is going to be a big one for education. With fees-free tertiary education already off the blocks, Education Minister Chris Hipkins is champing at the bit to get rid of National Standards, review NCEA, phase out charter schools, and look at other areas of education policy. One area crying out for attention is special education. In this issue we look at how we could improve provision for our students with learning differences and other priority learners. It is clear that our systems, funding and general approach in this area need a real shake-up. Associate Education Minister Tracey Martin assures us change is coming. We’re also poised for change here at Education Review. If you’re reading this online, you’ll know what I’m talking about – and if you’re reading a print copy, I suggest you take a look at educationreview.co.nz. Our website has been vastly improved, giving us more scope to enhance our articles with supplementary content that will allow you to dig deeper into the main topics. We aim to introduce video content, share more images, and provide links to related research and articles. Education Review sits neatly alongside our new site EducationCentral.co.nz. In just six months Education Central has already carved out a role in collating education news and providing exclusive opinion pieces, case studies and a forum for discussion. We encourage you to join the debate, welcome the changes and embrace everything that term 1 has to throw at you! Editor, Jude Barback editor@educationreview.co.nz Editorial note: Page 4 of our last issue showed an image of a woman sitting on a desk. We apologise for any offence caused to our readers by this image.

Go to educationreview.co.nz for web-exclusive content, including thought-provoking opinion articles from sector leaders.

Contents 2

Inclusive education – where are we going wrong?

NCEA review picking up pace

Teacher workload: buried in paperwork

Finding the Tarawera Way

More support needed to improve school culture, says advocacy group

Are we coding for coding’s sake?

Te Reo’s doubtful future and the prospect of compulsion

Too soon to declare qualifications dead

Doing something about dyslexia

What to do with charter schools

Educating teachers for a complex world

What can new teachers expect in 2018?

The new technologies set to enter your classroom in 2018

Future-focused spaces for future-focused learners

Should we make way for the teacherbots?

How important are school pools?

Losing the battle: The desperate need for more mental health funding in schools

Overseas education experts to hit NZ shores in 2018

Bridging the gap between research and practice in education

EDITOR

Jude Barback 07 542 3013 editor@educationreview.co.nz

ADVERTISING

Charles Ogilvie-Lee 04 915 9794 charles.ogilvie-lee@nzme-ed.co.nz

COMMERCIAL MANAGER

Fiona Reid

PRODUCTION Aaron Morey

SUBSCRIPTIONS

CONTRIBUTING WRITERS Jay Allnutt, Rowan Edwards, Chris Hipkins, Jody Hopkinson, Nikki Kaye, Mei Lin Low, Paul Moon, Roger Smyth and Melissa Wastney.

Fiona Reid 04 915 9795 fiona.reid@nzme-ed.co.nz

IMAGES

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EDUCATION REVIEW VOL 9 ISSUE 1

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NZ TEACHER 1

SPECIAL EDUCATION

INCLUSIVE EDUCATION:

– WHERE ARE WE GOING WRONG? New Zealand has one of the most inclusive education systems in the world. Research shows we are better at including students with special educational needs in mainstream classrooms than most other countries. Yet the stats, international assessment rankings and anecdotal evidence show that we’re not so crash-hot when it comes to meeting the needs of our priority learners and our students with special educational needs. JUDE BARBACK asks why.

ary Rogers gets upset when she thinks about two students in particular. They were both intelligent kids and both identified in year 1 with high dyslexic needs, the RTLB (Resource Teacher: Learning & Behaviour) recalls. Upon catching up on their progress years later, Rogers was saddened to learn they were both in prison. There is much we don’t know about the lives of these two students, and there are likely many factors impacting their respective outcomes – but we shouldn’t ignore the fact that two priority learners did not emerge successful from their education. Interestingly, about 10 per cent of children in the general population have dyslexia, while for their counterparts caught up in the justice system it’s as high as 32 per cent. Where are we going wrong? New Zealand has one of the most inclusive education systems in the world. Professor Garry Hornby’s 2014 research, as published in Advances in Special Education (Vol 28), outlines how New Zealand has gone further with the inclusion of students with special educational needs in mainstream classrooms than most other countries. However, Hornby points out that the New Zealand system hasn’t kept pace with developing provision for these children, which means many children with special educational needs are not getting the specialist help they need. International assessment rankings confirm that we’re not getting it right. The recent PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) rankings showed that inequality in learning outcomes is still very problematic for New Zealand. A wider gap between the top 10 per cent and bottom 10 per cent of New Zealand students exists than in most other OECD countries. The TIMSS (Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study) results paint a similar story.

CHANGES UNDERWAY

Since Hornby’s research, the Ministry of Education has taken steps to update our special education system with the Learning Support Update. A pilot was launched last year in the Bay of Plenty introducing more streamlined procedures to the system, including learning support teams to assess each learner’s needs and devise an

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appropriate programme of support. Once the pilot has been evaluated, it will then be rolled out nationwide if deemed successful. Change can’t come fast enough. Prior to the election and his appointment as Education Minister, Chris Hipkins described special education as “the most unmet need” in New Zealand education. In a recent Radio New Zealand interview, Hipkins said special education, or learning support, was “right at the front of the queue”. He has canned the previous Government’s plans to redirect learning support funding from secondary to early childhood, but acknowledges this means “putting more money into the learning support system”.

SYSTEMIC ISSUES

This year the Education Review Office (ERO) is conducting a national review into how effectively schools are responding to students with special educational needs.

However many say what schools really need is more funding for special education, and not another report. NZEI Te Riu Roa president Lynda Stuart, Principals’ Federation president Whetu Cormick, Berhampore School principal Mark Potter and IHC director of advocacy Trish Grant all told Radio New Zealand that more funding was desperately needed for special education. Insufficient funding is an important part of the problem, but there appear to be a number of other contributing systemic issues as well. For one, we shouldn’t downplay the effect of socioeconomic status on educational achievement. The PISA results indicate that we expect and tolerate a bigger range of achievement in New Zealand than do teachers and administrators in other countries. New OECD research shows that unlike many other countries, the percentage of New Zealand’s most disadvantaged students who are doing okay academically has significantly declined

SPECIAL EDUCATION

over the last ten years. If we could reach a better understanding of the reasons underpinning the link between socioeconomic status and educational achievement, we might be in a better position to improve the educational success of students who sit within our infamous and oft-mentioned “tail of underachievement”. Hornby points to some deficiencies with New Zealand’s SENCO (Special Educational Needs Coordinator) system. New Zealand has no requirement to have SENCOs in schools and no requirement for SENCO training. Of course many schools have them, but the role is often added on to a senior leadership team member’s remit with limited time allocation. Additionally, there is no statutory requirement for mainstream teachers to have training in working with students with special educational needs either through their initial teacher education or professional development. Last year, inclusive education advocacy group VIPS – Equity in Education collated experiences of parents, students, staff and specialists. Among the common themes to emerge was insufficient specialist support being available, insufficient staff training, staff ignoring specialist advice, students excluded, bullied and mistreated, and prioritising staff over students. There were concerns raised about the way some boards of trustees handled incidents involving students with special educational needs and how some failed to advocate for additional support to meet these needs. VIPS is also sceptical about the lack of independent scrutiny placed on boards’ handling of inclusive education. Children’s Commissioner Andrew Becroft agrees. He shared with Newsroom last year his concerns that, short of going to the High Court, there is no realistic way of challenging a board’s decision. He is eager to see the creation of an appeal system from suspension or exclusion decisions that will help children remain engaged in education. VIPS says the collective impact of limited government funding, modern learning environments, narrow teacher education, and the emphasis on academic success means many schools are steered towards the exclusion of some students rather than meeting the rights to safe inclusive education that are enshrined in international conventions and domestic legislation.

NOT MAKING THE MOST OF EPS AND RTLBS

One of these concerns worth noting is that of staff ignoring specialist advice. Recently it has become clear that we need to look at how schools work with educational psychologists (EPs) and Resource Teachers: Learning & Behaviour (RTLBs). The Ministry currently employs 172 full-time equivalent psychologists, but many say this is nowhere near enough. This year, the New Zealand Psychological Society (NZPsS), NZEI Te Riu Roa and the Institute of Educational and Developmental Psychology

(IEDP) issued a call to the Government to double the number of educational psychologists in order to meet current needs of our student population. The IEDP wants to see policies and programmes in place that ensure all learners can access the support they need. They want to see the Ministry supporting educational psychologists in delivering evidence-based interventions that are relevant to New Zealand schools. Part of the problem is that there is no requirement for schools to act on the recommendations of EPs and RTLBs. The other part is that there is often not enough funding for schools to implement their interventions. RTLB Mary Rogers has worked in clusters across the country from Waikato to Otago and Southland. She has observed many instances where specialist advice has been sought but not put effectively into practice. She gives the example of a school she worked at, that acknowledged they had a lack of understanding about the needs of its Māori students. They got a specialist in who conducted some excellent work, but none of it was acted upon in the classroom. An educational psychologist (EP), who does not wish to be named, shared similar concerns. Upon introducing a simple document to break classroom activities into steps for teachers of a girl with complex needs, including organisational and memory difficulties, the SENCO responded, “We can’t expect teachers to do this for every lesson”. In another example, in Auckland, the EP recommended an intelligent but vulnerable Māori boy from a gang-affiliated whānau be seated near the teacher with a high level of monitoring and praise. Upon observing him off-task at the back of the class, the EP later asked if the teacher had read his report. The teacher responded, “Yes, but if he wants to sit at the back doing nothing with his mates, that’s his choice”. The EP has since

heard that the student sits firmly within the youth offending system. In a third instance, a primary school teacher failed to adopt the EP’s recommendations for a primary school student because, according to a colleague, “She likes to get back to her lifestyle section by 3.15pm”. Are such responses due to the embedded Kiwi cultural norm of having an aversion to being told what to do? Certainly, there is an apparent reluctance on the part of teachers, sector leaders, government agencies and policy makers to inflict anything mandatory or compulsory upon the sector. Responding to calls for all schools to include Māori Land Wars in the curriculum, former Education Minister Hekia Parata said that it is “not the New Zealand way” to compel specific things.

VIRTUES OF A HIGH TRUST MODEL

Current minister Chris Hipkins is eager to see New Zealand teachers working within a high trust system. A high trust model essentially gives teachers more autonomy, more freedom to try new things and take risks. It is a model that allows teachers to flourish. Principal at St Mary’s School in Gore, Annie Nelson, is a fan of a high trust model and of “people who take a risk on behalf of the learner”. She believes teachers are not trusted as much as they could be. Nelson says there is a tendency for teachers to wait for extra support but she thinks they should be trusted to rely on their instincts and do what needs to be done. If a teacher has been burned before, they won’t take those risks, she says. Nelson says she’s had teachers who have been teaching for over 20 years say they’re nervous at the prospect of a quick teaching observation. By contrast, other countries, including the US, UK and many European countries, place their teachers under greater scrutiny and hold them

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SPECIAL EDUCATION

more accountable than teachers in New Zealand. In the UK, for example, OFSTED (Office for Standards in Education) – the UK’s version of ERO – reduced their warning time for a school inspection from three weeks to zero, meaning schools could be subject to unannounced inspections. As a result, most schools are said to operate on a heightened state of vigilance and competence. The negative side of this is that teachers are evermindful of being scrutinised and fearful of taking risks. It isn’t hard to see how OFSTED earned its nickname, ‘The Gestapo’. Nelson, who originally taught in the UK, isn’t a fan of OFSTED’s approach. “I once heard someone from OFSTED say, ‘If staff morale is at an all-time low, you know you’re doing something right’,” she says. Nelson says she wouldn’t return to teaching in the UK. Nelson believes teachers shouldn’t live in fear of ERO. She supports the notion of unannounced visits but only if they are conducted as a reassurance to teachers, rather than a big event every few years that schools plan for. “Teachers are often exhausted after ERO,” she says.

THE UK’S APPROACH

her son’s needs were not adequately supported at his previous school. “I was told by staff, ‘Oh, we’ve had kids like him before, we know how to manage him’.” She felt little effort was taken by the school to get to know his specific needs and or how to cater for them. His behaviour worsened, bullying worsened, and he nearly faced expulsion. “I’m at the point where if I could homeschool, I would,” she says.

INCLUSIVE EDUCATION WITHIN A HIGH TRUST MODEL

Rogers believes the effectiveness of a school’s leadership team (SLT) also plays a major role. “Having worked with over 80 principals and as many DPs, three characteristics stand out as effective leadership: people skills, possessing and imparting knowledge of effective pedagogy, and being able to have the hard conversations with both students and staff.” Rogers believes leadership teams who use Band-aid strategies to manage priority learners fail to develop teacher practice and core issues remain, resulting in poor outcomes for this group of learners. By contrast, the leadership team at another school at which Rogers worked, took a lot on board – and consequently the RTLB service had a 78 per cent reduction in referrals. Being a principal or a deputy principal is not a popularity contest, she says. It’s about professional respect, not being liked. “It’s a fine line. At another school I’ve worked at they are completely over-managed and the teachers are scared to do anything.”

Despite the UK’s success with raising the bar for inclusive education, implementing such an approach here is hard to fathom. Mandatory frameworks and unannounced audits fly in the

IMPORTANCE OF STRONG LEADERSHIP

Upon introducing a simple document to break classroom activities into steps for teachers of a girl with complex needs, including organisational and memory difficulties, the SENCO responded, “We can’t expect teachers to do this for every lesson”.

The UK’s stricter regime has had a positive impact on inclusive education, however. Hot on the heels of the 2010 Equalities Act, OFSTED announced in 2012 that a school could only be rated ‘good’ or ‘outstanding’ if good progress had been made by special education students and other priority learners. Two years later the 2014 SEND Code of Practice came into play, introducing more checks and balances into the system. The overall result of these changes has been that all teachers are not only more aware of the importance of catering to the needs of their priority learners, but actively take on board the suggestions of their SENCO, in keeping with expectations and, indeed, the legislative requirements. Further, all newly appointed SENCOs in the UK must gain a mandatory master’s-level qualification and adhere to a framework. “Now, I would say most teachers are on board with the inclusion message,” says Maggie Morgan, a SENCO at a school in the UK. “I get emails every day from teachers who want advice on strategies to use with individual students, and I get an impressive turnout at voluntary after-school SEND training events that I deliver for my colleagues.” It is prudent to point out, however, that Morgan is nervous about the future of inclusive education under the current British government. The decision to introduce cuts to schools’ budgets will likely result in fewer teaching support staff and increased class sizes, to the detriment of children with special educational needs. Morgan is also fearful that the current government’s push for selective education –

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currently on hold following objections by the teaching unions – will reverse the whole inclusion agenda. Furthermore, the damaging cuts to support services such as speech and language therapists and educational psychologists have resulted in schools being unable to fulfil their statutory SEND obligations. “Inclusion as a philosophy is in a very fragile place and all the advances made over the past three decades could be suddenly reversed,” she says.

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face of all that is cherished by the New Zealand system. But does our approach to inclusive education expose a weakness in our high trust model? In the absence of unpopular and restrictive mandatory measures of accountability, it is possible for schools and teachers to neglect the educational needs of their priority learners. Schools that exhibit excellent practice typically have a high level of structure, expectations and programmes of support. Schools with poor practice don’t. Both types of schools exist within our communities. A 2016 Radio New Zealand report on special education confirmed this, with parents of children with special educational needs saying that while some schools went out of their way to be inclusive, others did not. Those that didn’t tended to take this stance because they were inadequately resourced to cope with children with learning differences. Mother-of-two Glenda Reed recently moved to Te Kopuru, near Dargaville, for a fresh start, after years of struggling to get the appropriate support for her son. After noticing her son’s “concerning behaviour” when he was about eight-and-a-half, Reed tried to seek help, suspecting her son was autistic. She was offered various solutions ranging from the Incredible Years parenting programme to Child Youth & Family’s decision for her son to live with his father for a year. Help arrived three years later when she was finally referred to a child psychologist who assessed her son and diagnosed him with ADHD and anxiety. However, Reed feels

ARE WE TRULY FOCUSED ON THE LEARNER?

All of this begs the uncomfortable question of whether New Zealand’s education system is truly designed to meet the needs of learners or those of the adults working within it. This is reflected in the updated Education Act, which has been criticised for its lack of focus on children and learners. If we are ultimately concerned with whether our priority learners succeed, perhaps we need to take a long hard look at our current systems so that the advice of specialist experts doesn’t go unheeded? It will be interesting to see what ERO finds in its national review into how effectively schools are responding to students with special educational needs. It is likely to conclude that schools require more resourcing and expertise to effectively provide for students with learning differences. It might also address the need for schools to have robust systems in place, driven and overseen by school leadership, to carry out recommended interventions. Ultimately, “the most unmet need” in education needs to be met, and fast.

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NCEA

NCEA REVIEW PICKING UP PACE Education Minister CHRIS HIPKINS says the NCEA review is an opportunity to improve the assessment system.

ate last year I announced that the Government will undertake a review of National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA) this year. The review starts in February and has a number of stages. It is an opportunity to take the pulse of New Zealand’s key secondary school national qualification, and to make necessary refinements and changes to ensure it remains modern and relevant for young people leaving school. We want to channel the experiences of people who interact with NCEA. Everyone can make a contribution – parents, whānau, teachers, school leaders, tertiary providers, iwi, employers, and the public. At the top of the list of issues we will focus on are the over-assessment of students and the teacher workload. Students and teachers have been saying things need to be done in these areas to counter teacher burnout and put more emphasis on actual teaching. And the full potential of NCEA has yet to be fully realised, likely due in part to the way targets around credit accumulation have driven the implementation of the qualifications.

And there’s a lot more than this besides, including looking at the role of each level of NCEA, particularly the structure and relevance of NCEA Level 1 and whether all young people should attempt it. The Ministry of Education is running the review, starting with range of stakeholders and opening up for all New Zealanders to comment and contribute. They will be supported by a special Ministerial Advisory Group that has been tasked with challenging traditional thinking. A youth advisory group has also been set up to capture the insights of students. I encourage Education Review readers to read the Terms of Reference for the review and the Cabinet Paper ‘Reviewing NCEA’ at www.education.govt.nz/ncea-review. They are passionate about education and I’m keen for them to share their ideas. NCEA is an important and enduring qualification and, collectively, we have a great opportunity to make it even better. Let’s make this review count.

KEY STAGES AND DATES 1

Representative Consultation

From February 2018 the Ministry and the Ministerial Advisory Group, in consultation with stakeholders, will identify relevant topics for public consultation.

Working Groups

The Ministry and the Ministerial Advisory Group will work with groups and stakeholders to refine topics to be focused on by the review, and the consultation process.

Discussion Document

In late April the Ministerial Advisory Group, supported by the Ministry of Education, and with contribution from the Youth Advisory Group, will draft a Discussion Document which will be submitted to the Minister of Education.

Public Consultation

From late April the Ministry will hold wider public consultation on NCEA through a range of formats such as workshops and surveys. The Ministry of Education will also engage with focus groups to capture the voices of young people and their families and whānau.

Consultation and Recommendation Reports

In late August the Ministry will summarise inputs into a Consultation Report from its consultation processes. In September, with contribution from the Ministerial and Youth advisory groups, the Ministry of Education will draft a Recommendations Report for the Minister of Education.

Implementation Report

An Implementation Report will be developed by the Ministry of Education and released in early 2019. It will lay out the next steps to implement recommendations.

Implementation

Any outcomes of the review will be clearly signalled and implemented with regard to the impact upon stakeholders.

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TEACHER WORKLOAD

BURIED IN PAPERWORK

It’s thought to be one of the biggest complaints teachers make: too much paperwork. But what exactly does this mean? Marking and moderation is only the beginning, writes MELISSA WASTNEY.

t’s unlikely anyone would choose teaching as a career because they enjoy filling in forms and filing, yet paperwork has become a big part of the job. Recently released NZCER surveys have shown that teachers believe compliance and paperwork are taking them away from their core work with students. The New Zealand Council for Educational Research (NZCER) National Survey of Primary and Intermediate Schools 2016 showed that about two-thirds of principals worked 56 hours or more each week, and 42 per cent reported high or very high stress levels. Only around a third of principals thought their workload was manageable or sustainable, the study found, with an increase in respondents seeking more time for the essence of their work – education leadership – and less spent on administration and paperwork. New educators are also feeling overwhelmed, with a NZEI Te Riu Roa survey of 288 new teachers showing that 17 per cent expect to leave the profession within five years of graduating. High workloads, too much paperwork and low pay were cited as key reasons. “I do enjoy teaching; however, the paperwork is huge and not the best pay while you are just starting out,” said one survey respondent. This situation has been acknowledged by the new Government. Labour’s Education Manifesto made mention of the issue in its first paragraph: “The way we live and work continues to change rapidly, so too do the demands we place on our education system. However, too often creativity and innovation is being hampered by government red tape and compliance requirements. “Increasingly teachers and educationalists tell us that they’re spending so much time testing

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and filling in forms to satisfy bureaucratic accountability requirements that they don’t have enough time to do what they’re actually there to do – teach,” it says. The document promises to address paperwork specifically. “Labour will establish a joint task-force with the teaching profession to reduce the amount of compliance-focused paperwork teachers are required to complete so that they can return their focus to what really matters – teaching and learning,” it states.

COMPLIANCE DRIVEN

For secondary teachers, student marking and moderation makes up a large proportion of the paperwork, but it’s more complicated than that. A 2016 report by the Post Primary Teachers’ Association (PPTA) from its Workload Working Group highlighted concerns about the sheer weight of the administrative tasks now expected to be completed by teachers. “There is a range of administrative work associated with (secondary) teaching, leadership and pastoral care, including reporting, meetings, data collection, management and analysis, surveys, parent contact, health and safety, organising relief, photocopying, NCEA administration tasks (e.g. record keeping, data analysis), appraisal and registration requirements, special education applications, IT management and support,” the report states. “These are often delegated from the principal to senior leaders to departments and middle leaders and teachers. Administration tasks are often shared with support staff, and reductions in support staff hours or numbers can affect the balance of that work.”

The PPTA Workload Working Group found that teachers in middle management positions, in addition to high teaching loads, were especially affected by increases in such tasks. “Middle leaders and teachers see much of the administration work they do as unproductive and time consuming. They have limited time in the working day to manage increases in administration and are frustrated with the largely unproductive nature of the work. Much of it is seen as having no impact on teaching and learning but rather being compliance driven. It is a distraction from teaching and teaching-related activities,” the report states. PPTA president Jack Boyle believes the amount of paperwork that teachers are now expected to undertake is getting out of hand. “I believe it’s grown exponentially over the past decade,” he says. “As a teacher, you’re accountable to your students and their whānau, your colleagues and your school, and your community. But the problem is in how that accountability is demonstrated.” Boyle lists assessment and moderation, teacher inquiry and the reporting around it, Education Council compliance work and documents pertaining to Education Review Office visits as just the beginning. “Then there are also, unfortunately, examples of over-engineering at the school level, which generates another set of compliance for teachers,” he says. “In the case of teacher inquiry, this work is really important, but it’s moved from being a simple ‘I tried this, and it didn’t work for this reason’, to a stash of documents that need to be presented and distributed to a range of people, including school leaders, boards and the Education Council.

TEACHER WORKLOAD “The compliance and documentation has, I believe, lost sight of its original intention, which was to help teachers improve their teaching. “A lot of it seems to be paperwork as proof of having done other paperwork. It comes down to a lack of general trust in teachers’ judgement as professionals.”

INTERRUPTING GOOD TEACHING

Liam Rutherford, a year 7 and 8 teacher at Ross Intermediate in Palmerston North, is this year working with teachers to support collaborative practices across the school. Rutherford says that much of the paperwork all New Zealand teachers are now expected to do interrupts the core job of classroom teaching and learning. “Teachers really want to be doing sports, arts and cultural activities, and all the things we know make a huge difference to a child’s learning and holistic development,” he says. “I tend to think about it in terms of the job’s workload in general. There are lots of different streams, but right in the centre of that is paperwork, particularly administrative kind of stuff. You have to do that first before you can get onto the big, important things.” This paperwork includes researching and planning a year’s curriculum, adapting it for individual students and putting systems in place to track progress.

Then there’s planning and moderation with fellow teachers to ensure consistency across a school. Teachers also are required to take and distribute notes from team and school meetings and write reports. There is also an expectation to record data from parent teacher conferences. Documents need to be safely filed away, but Rutherford says technology has made that a lot easier in recent years. “Using G Suite [cloud-based software] means you never really have to move documents and emails because they can be safely stored in the cloud – although there can be a learning curve for teachers understanding how best to use these systems. But once they’re up and running, they can be invaluable,” he says. Student management systems are also integral for writing reports and storing assessment data. However, Rutherford is quick to point out that some paperwork is beneficial to teacher development and student learning. “Professional development is something that comes with an increased workload attached, but at the same time there is great value in it. The Education Council’s professional standards are also very important, but at the same time the compliance work around these is not work done with students.” A drive in many schools to forge stronger partnerships with whānau is another example.

“There’s a real push for community engagement too and schools are always looking for ways to connect with whānau to support student learning. Much of this can be done online, through blogs and apps like SeeSaw.” Forms that need to be filled out and returned, money for trips and activities and newsletters will be familiar to all parents with children at school. “The majority of these forms at our school are templated; we’re constantly looking for shortcuts and efficiencies. It differs between schools, but permission slips and similar forms are usually managed by the classroom teacher,” says Rutherford. “I’ve got spreadsheets for Africa on my computer! But it’s a complex issue – some paperwork relates to Ministry of Education requirements; some is for ERO and some is classroom and school-based. The solution isn’t going to be fixed by one particular saspect changing. “We need to sit down and acknowledge that a high teacher workload has adverse effects on student learning,” he says. “I don’t think any teachers have a passion for administration work – we’re passionate about education and working with young people.”

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NZ TEACHER 7

SCHOOL TRANSFORMATION

FINDING THE TARAWERA WAY Tarawera High School principal Helen Tuhoro shares with JUDE BARBACK the remarkable story of how the school’s transformation is turning things around for the students and whānau of Kawerau.

awerau often gets a bad rap. For years the Bay of Plenty town struggled to shrug off its social problems. Its reputation for crime and poverty led to some of the lowest house prices in New Zealand and played a big part in the demise of the local high school and intermediate. Yet, as anyone who has visited Kawerau will know, the town is also set in one of the most pure and beautiful parts of the country. With its forests, rivers, lakes and mountains, it is a mecca for hiking, mountain-biking, hunting, fishing and multisport. It is hard to imagine gang-related crime and drug use against such a clean, green, wholesome backdrop. Tarawera High School turned to its unique and stunning environment in an effort to bring meaning and relevance to their students’ learning. The school backs onto Tarawera River, which is flush with trout. Students and staff embarked on a shared learning experience, raising trout. They analysed temperatures and conditions before releasing them into the stream. “We didn’t have great success the first year,” recalls principal Helen Tuhoro, “but we learned from it.” The school doesn’t offer straight English and maths classes. Instead it offers an integrated curriculum, which incorporates learning into

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modules that are aimed to motivate students to, firstly, turn up to class, and, secondly, enjoy what they’re doing and progress. The curriculum, which they’ve named the Authentic Local Engaging Curriculum (ALEC), was built by staff. The school closed at 2pm every Wednesday in 2014 so that teachers could work on building a curriculum that met the needs of their students. There are pathways for kids who want to go to university, with advanced literacy and numeracy classes and physics and chemistry on offer. “But not a high percentage of students take this path,” says Tuhoro, “We’d love it to be higher.” This contextualised learning approach appears to be breaking the pattern of low pass rates and low attendance. “It sounds radical but we had 56 per cent attendance when we started. Now they are doing what they want to do, so they’re actually turning up.” Take outdoor education, for example. Activities like kayaking, rafting, mountain-biking and rockclimbing give students opportunities to learn through doing. “If you said to them, we’re going to sit down and do geometry now, you’d get ‘ohhhh’,” says Tuhoro, giving a perfect imitation of a teenager’s reaction to an afternoon of geometry. “Instead, they learn about angles through belaying when rock climbing. Instead of sitting down and working out how to calculate velocity, they learn about measuring speed when out on the mountain bikes.” For performing arts, students produced Animal Farm by George Orwell, incorporating literacy, technology, make-up artistry, budget-setting and so on. The timetable is set up so that students do one subject all day, allowing them to really focus

on what they’re doing. It also means they don’t disrupt other classes when they go on field trips. Tuhoro says the goal is to keep students in education to at least Level 2. And they’re on track: the Level 2 pass rate that once sat at 46 per cent in 2013 rose to 90 per cent in 2016.

TRANSFORMATION

How do you turn around a school where nearly half the students didn’t bother turning up in the first place? It required radical action. The Ministry of Education made the decision to close Kawerau High School and Kawerau Intermediate School in 2012. The schools were in financial strife, the pass rates weren’t good and attendance was dire. Even so, it wasn’t a popular decision and caused a lot of resentment in the community. “There was a lot of animosity and agro,” recalls Tuhoro. “The school was gutted completely once it was closed. There wasn’t a single book or resource left.” A completely new school catering for years 7 to 13 was established in their place: Tarawera High School. It got off to a rocky start, at the height of the Novopay debacle – meaning new staff weren’t getting paid. Of 46 new staff, only three from the old schools were given jobs. “I wasn’t popular with the community for this, but I knew change was the only way forward.” However, staff retention was an issue in the early years as the school embarked on such radical change. Some new teachers didn’t last the first term, says Tuhoro. “I always tell prospective staff to walk around the school and talk to the kids. They’re very open, our kids. They want to know what you’re doing there. Once they know you, they’ve got

SCHOOL TRANSFORMATION

“I always say to [new staff], you’re not going to get a bad appraisal from me if you try something new and it doesn’t work.”

Previous page: Tarawera High School's junior kapa haka group. This page, left: A Tarawera performing arts student learns about lighting; above: Tarawera High School; below: Principal Helen Tuhoro with MP Tamati Coffey.

your back,” she says. “Kawerau kids are very protective of their community.” Tuhoro encourages her staff to take risks. Her mantra is to view challenges as opportunities. She values the ability to think outside the box above all else. This particularly appeals to young staff coming on board who relish the freedom to ‘have a go’. “I always say to them, you’re not going to get a bad appraisal from me if you try something new and it doesn’t work.”

Perceptions are slowly changing and community support is building. A larger percentage of year 7 students from the two feeder schools are now enrolling in Tarawera High School. Tuhoro says the parents of kids coming through now remember her from when she taught them at Kawerau Intermediate school. “So there is more trust now.” 2018 will also be the first year that students will have only attended Tarawera High School, and not transferred from one of the schools that closed.

NOT FOR THE FAINT-HEARTED

MODERN LEARNING

Tuhoro had lived in Kawerau for over 30 years and taught there for 15 years, but she had never been a principal before. As first-time principal jobs go, this was surely one of the most challenging roles out there: leading a controversial new school into better times against a backdrop of animosity and some serious social issues. Tuhoro admits it hasn’t been easy and is grateful for the huge amount of support from her husband, who works at the local mill. The school had its share of issues, including a huge drug problem. “I had to take a very hard line on this and excluded a lot of students. In the first years three busloads left Kawerau to go to [schools in] Whakatane; this has now significantly reduced.” Things are now turning around at Tarawera. Tuhoro talks about the ‘Tarawera Way’, which is all about developing MANA, a clever acronym for the school’s set of shared values: Manaakitanga, Ako, Ngākau-pono, Āwhina. She says the PB4L (Positive Behaviour for Learning) programme has made a real difference. “We still have our naughties, but they’re the minority now,” she says. “They used to be the majority.”

Tarawera’s modern learning environment (MLE) opened in 2016. It was the first decile 1 school in New Zealand to have an MLE. They built in a lot of community consultation and engagement around the change. An open school policy and iNative evenings helped to build understanding among whānau about what they were doing. In spite of these measures, Tuhoro says it hasn’t been an easy change. “A significant number of the kids live with their grandparents and it represents such a change from their schooling that it’s hard for them to grasp.” She says some teachers have also struggled with teaching in a modern learning environment, and there has been some turnover as a result. “We’re a Google school – so we’ve moved completely away from pen and paper. It’s a 24/7 job now – teachers will be up marking work that’s submitted at 10 at night.” Tuhoro thinks they are another two or three years away from really understanding MLEs. “We’ve got a long way to go. And to be honest we probably won’t ever get there. That’s the thing about 21st-century education – the yardsticks keep moving.”

REALITY CHECK

The bells and whistles of modern learning don’t hide the realities faced by the many students who live within what Tuhoro describes as “a community in high poverty”. She gives a common scenario. “A student might get to school at 10.30am because Nan’s not well and they had to make the little ones’ lunches and get them to school first. “Many are adopting the parent role for younger siblings. We can’t pretend these sorts of circumstances don’t exist for these kids.” “We’re a decile 1 school. We offer our kids breakfast four days a week. We give them shoes and socks and even macs to wear. We find them places to stay sometimes. We have a social worker (SWIS) and a guidance counsellor who are run off their feet. It is a community in high poverty.” But there are signs that things are turning around, not just at school but in the wider community. “We’re working on getting the gang culture out of school – enforcing the school cap, not gang colours. Youth Aid is supportive of what we’re doing, and teachers go beyond the call of duty to build relationships.” Tuhoro can’t emphasise enough the lengths her staff go to for the kids. Among the school’s values is the notion of Āwhina and the proverb: ‘Kāhore taku toa i te toa takitahi, he toa takitini – We cannot succeed without the support of those around us’, which certainly rings true for Tarawera High School. But so too does this: ‘Haere taka mua, taka muri, kaua e whai – Be a leader, not a follower’. Without Tuhoro’s gutsy leadership, it is unlikely that Tarawera High School would be this far along its journey of transformation.

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NZ TEACHER 9

BULLYING

MORE SUPPORT NEEDED

TO IMPROVE SCHOOL CULTURE, SAYS ADVOCACY GROUP In a rare move, the Ministry of Education has agreed to override zoning rules to allow a bullied student to change schools this year. Is this merely a Band-Aid solution that avoids addressing an underlying culture of bullying in our schools?

n autistic student who suffered ongoing bullying at a Pakuranga school has been allowed to attend an out-ofzone school to start afresh. Parents Andrew and Tracey Hill said they were “ecstatic” after the Ministry of Education told them their 12-year-old son would be able to move to a new school, after last year turning down the family’s request for a directed enrolment. Andrew Hill said the family was overwhelmed with supportive messages after the case was reported in the media last week, and his son was relieved to be able to move to another school, after a year of being badly bullied at Pakuranga Intermediate School. “He is just walking on air,” he said. “It’s just unbelievable, we still can’t believe it,” Andrew Hill told the New Zealand Herald. Pakuranga Intermediate principal Stephen Johnston said in a written statement to the Herald that the school “worked with the family and child to support his transition into intermediate schooling and throughout the past year”. “In this time, the school, Ministry of Education senior advisers and the Resource Teachers of Learning and Behaviour service had worked hard to support the child’s needs,” he said. Ministry guidelines say that parents seeking a directive must provide “specialist medical or psychological or other expert opinion” and that the Ministry will consult with a school board before directing it to enrol any student. Directed enrolments are not commonly used to address issues of educational access for children with special educational needs or those who have been bullied, Youthlaw senior solicitor Jennifer Walsh told the Herald. “As a consequence, if it’s a bullying issue, they are more inclined to say we can deal with it in the school where it’s arisen.” Ministry of Education acting deputy secretary Susan Howan says while rare, it is a useful provision in some cases. “Occasionally it can be in the best interests of a student to move to a different school. If necessary, the Ministry has the power to direct a school to accept an out-of-zone student. “This provision is not used often, but it is used in cases where there would be serious consequences for a student in not being enrolled in a particular school. Sometimes bullying is a factor in out-ofzone enrolments,” she says. Bullying is taken seriously, and the Ministry offers a range of support to schools, including the Positive Behaviour for Learning (PB4L) SchoolWide programme that aims to create and maintain a supportive and safe culture in schools.

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“Bullying is not okay. Every child and young person should feel safe at school,” she says. “Principals and their staff do a lot of work to prevent bullying and in most instances, when it occurs, they are able to deal with it satisfactorily themselves. Schools use a variety of approaches to promote wellbeing and belonging for all students. “We help schools to prevent bullying by providing a range of resources, including a guide for parents and guidance on developing and implementing antibullying strategies.” However, a national advocacy group believes the Ministry needs to improve the support offered and be more transparent when making decisions about directed enrolments. VIPS – Equity in Education is an online advocacy forum for special needs education with a diverse membership base that includes educators and parents. Commenting on social media, the group expressed dismay about the Ministry of Education’s decision. “Allowing a bullied autistic student to swap schools out of zone is not a victory, or a breakthrough. Cutting a bit of clerical red tape doesn’t address the bullying or lack of support the previous school offered,” they tweeted. In a group response to Education Central’s questions, VIPS says the Ministry’s intervention in this particular case seems to be arbitrary. “Many families describe being repeatedly let down by the Ministry’s lack of assistance, instead deferring to schools’ self-governing autonomy,” they say.

“While it is good to see the Ministry finally intervening on behalf of a student, it fails to address every child’s right to attend and be safe in their local school. It is not always practical for families to travel elsewhere, especially if a student has additional learning needs. Increased in-school support can benefit all children and staff.” More needs to be done in schools where bullying is a serious issue, says VIPS. “If a school board of trustees and their staff are not meeting their obligations, then the Ministry should act to address it. At present, Ministry guidelines and school policies are simply empty words without anyone to enforce them. “The Ministry’s decision to intervene in this situation appears to be arbitrary, and in response to media pressure.” VIPS believes the Ministry needs to better support students to attend their local school by improving the way complaints are handled, and providing better transparency of their own decision making processes. “Moving schools should be available to families without excessive burden to provide expensive specialist reports, which not everyone can afford, or being subjected to a long, arduous, arbitrary, unbalanced process. “Due to the Ministry’s repeated failure to support students in the current self-governing school model, we feel the establishment of an independent complaints authority for education issues is well overdue,” says the group.

USEFUL INFORMATION FOR SCHOOLS Tackling bullying as early as possible is the most effective way to limit the damaging impact that it can have, and give children the best possible chance in life. The Ministry of Education has a bullying prevention and response guide for schools, containing information on programmes, strategies and tools available. There are a large number of tools and resources on the Bullying Free NZ website which school leaders are encouraged to use, including a new guide for school trustees. The Education Review Office (ERO) checks if schools have clear documentation, reporting of incidents and serious harm, bullying prevention procedures and anonymous surveys (where necessary). They also look at whether wellbeing and inclusion is monitored and if the school uses the Wellbeing@School survey. ERO’s School Trustees Booklet Helping you ask the right questions can be accessed on ERO’s website. ERO’s work on wellbeing provides school leaders and teachers with good ideas and models to support them in promoting wellbeing for their students – Wellbeing for Success – a resource for schools. Information about 11P Directed Enrolments can be accessed on the Education Ministry’s website.

CODING

ARE WE CODING FOR CODING’S SAKE?

More and more Kiwi kids are learning to code, but are teachers empowering their students to think critically and solve problems, or just introducing them to the latest tech fad? By JUDE BARBACK.

n early December last year, Te Papa in Wellington was heaving with budding coders participating in the global Hour of Code initiative. Students explored the Hour of Code game, teachers experimented with a range of coding applications, and members of the public learned to programme a robot and code their own memes. The Te Papa events, supported by Accenture, were among 444 registered Hour of Code events in New Zealand and 154,100 events worldwide. The idea behind it: to help students around the world learn the basics of coding. Everyone seems to think learning to code is a good idea. It’s hard to argue with the logic that we want our students to become creators of content – and not mere consumers. But is it just a fad? Will grown-up Gen Zers reminisce at parties and say, “Remember when we had to learn how to code? What a waste of time that was!”? Right now it’s a nifty thing to learn and teach, but experts such as Dr Richard Campbell of Coding Heroes in South Korea say we are within 10 years of coding becoming commoditised. The $100,000 salaried roles will be more like $40,000, he says, because it won’t be a specialised skill anymore – everyone will know how to code. Learning Without Frontiers founder Graham Brown-Martin goes one step further and says it won’t be long before coding will all be automated anyway. But Campbell says this shouldn’t put us off learning to code. The point of teaching coding goes beyond the mechanics of learning to code. “We shouldn’t be teaching coding for coding’s sake. It’s the creativity, critical thinking and other 21st-century skills that kids utilise that are important to take away from the coding experience.” Don Carlson, director of education for Microsoft Asia Pacific, agrees. “Coding empowers young people, giving them the tools they need to not only express themselves, but also transform the way they think critically and solve complex problems.” Minecraft Education director Neal Manegold sees Minecraft – the popular computer game and learning tool – as a vehicle for creativity, collaboration and problem solving with openended student-centred challenges. It lends itself to project-based learning, he says. Manegold says Minecraft can be used across all subjects.

“It’s not a case of teachers saying ,‘OK, now it’s Minecraft time’; it’s about seamless curriculum integration.” He points to a growing bank of Minecraft lesson plans shared by teachers, for teachers. Most of the plans are multidisciplinary. One lesson plan tasks students with building a sustainable community on an island with limited resources, touching on literacy, geography and environmental sciences. Manegold also says there needs to be clear evidence of students’ learning. “It’s not enough for teachers to say, ‘I’m cool, I’m using Minecraft’. Students need to be able to show the benefits of what they’re doing and what they’ve learned.” Campbell agrees that coding should be incorporated into all disciplines and not left to the computer science teacher to teach. As an English teacher, he got his students to code a trick from Roald Dahl’s The Twits. “Teachers need to be unafraid to teach beyond what they know, and to fail. They need to be able to learn from their students.” Adele Warburton, who teaches at Canterbury’s Methven Primary School, is happy to admit that her students have a better grasp on Minecraft than her. “They’re digital natives after all. Accepting differences is one of our school values and the kids have to accept that I’m useless!” she says.

The values and 21st-century skills learned along the way are all part of why Warburton has embraced Minecraft. Using Minecraft as a learning tool encourages collaboration, communication, creativity and problem solving, she says. It also teaches kids about being good digital citizens. “We talk about how you wouldn’t rip someone’s book up, therefore you wouldn’t tear down their house in Minecraft.” The University of Canterbury’s Tracy Henderson is an advocate for incorporating computational thinking into education. Computational thinking, which features in the new digital technologies curriculum, is the underlying process of solving problems where the solution is implemented in a programming language for a digital device. Henderson says a teacher’s role is to empower students to be able to produce programs that solve a given problem, rather than put together something that is restricted to a few tools that they have taught themselves. “One of the major misconceptions and perceptions about students in our school system is that because our students are digital natives and that technology is getting easier to use, our students don’t need to learn about this. The reality is they are great consumers of technology, but don’t necessarily have the computational thinking skills to be great creators of technology.”

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NZ TEACHER 11

TE REO

TE REO’S DOUBTFUL FUTURE AND THE PROSPECT OF COMPULSION Professor PAUL MOON says making Te Reo compulsory in schools is not the answer.

hat sort of state is Te Reo in? If it was a person, its condition would be one of a patient on life support. Its pulse beats weakly; its other vital signs still appear to indicate that there is (faint) cause for hope, but linguistic atrophy is spreading from the extremities to the core, and the entire body is only being given the semblance of life by a large and cumbersome academic and bureaucratic apparatus that keeps the essential functions working. The last great hope being held out by some politicians and policy-makers at present is for the language to be made a compulsory subject in the country’s schools. Compulsion has an instinctive appeal: a bold step in support of a language in a perilous state, and gives the impression that something substantial is being done – metaphorically – to stop the bleeding. In February 2017 the Green Party of Aotearoa New Zealand announced its support for the compulsory teaching of Te Reo Māori. This policy was accompanied by the assertion that “[we] have a responsibility to ensure that our indigenous language thrives in Aotearoa. Introducing all children to it at school is the best way to make that happen”. The claim that compulsion is the “best way” to ensure that Te Reo “thrives” in the country reveals an exceptional ignorance of the basic tenets of languages. Such policies are bereft of sufficient analysis or understanding of the challenges facing Te Reo. The call for compulsion also signals that the normal transmission mechanisms of the language have broken down – something that no amount of compulsion can remedy. Policies

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requiring compulsion are a rather unsophisticated reflex response to an intricate cultural and social challenge, involving a complex web of motives and nuanced sociolinguistic considerations. But the most compelling reason to avoid compulsion in schools is that it has a consistent record of failure when it comes to reviving indigenous languages. After the formation of the Irish Free State in 1921, for example, Irish was made compulsory, but this did little to advance the cause of the indigenous language, and eventually did not achieve the hoped-for revitalisation of Irish, which is currently in near-terminal decline.

The most compelling reason to avoid compulsion in schools is that it has a consistent record of failure when it comes to reviving indigenous languages. In Singapore, under the Mother Tongue Language policy, all students are required to study their respective official mother-tongue language. Tamil (one of the country’s four official languages) is a compulsory subject in schools for Tamil students and is available in most public schools. Yet, despite this compulsion, the use of the Tamil language as a household language among Singapore’s Tamil population fell from 42.9 per cent to 36.7 per cent between 2000 and 2010, despite

increased government funding and new strategies to encourage the language’s revitalisation. The same trend is evident in Luxembourg, where the indigenous language – Luxembourgish – is now classified as endangered, meaning that it is at risk of becoming extinct in the near future. Despite being a compulsory subject in schools since 1912 (as well as being a requirement for naturalisation from 1938, and being declared a national language in 1983), the language is in decline and faces dying out altogether. In 1990 Welsh was made compulsory in Wales for students from the age of five to 14, and in 1999 this compulsion was extended to students up to the age of 16. However, even with this compulsion, along with a range of other state-sponsored measures to support the language’s revitalisation, the 2011 census revealed there had been a decline in both the absolute number of Welsh speakers and their proportion in the population of Wales as a whole – a trend that is expected to continue. A similar pattern of compulsory indigenous second-language teaching in schools failing to revive those languages has occurred with Catalan, and collectively, these examples illustrate that compulsion, even when accompanied by the fully armoury of language-revitalisation strategies, and even when undertaken in countries where the indigenous culture is in the majority, fail in their single objective: to prevent the language in question from declining further. There is another dimension to this failure, however, that is less apparent. The political capital expended in order to get an indigenous language made compulsory in a state school system is enormous. Once the advocates of such a policy

TE REO

have accomplished their aim, they are much less likely to have sufficient remaining political leverage in the short term to achieve anything else on such a scale. And herein lies the danger: they are left with a system of compulsion that is destined to fail in its goal of revitalising the indigenous language, and with little political currency remaining to advance the cause of the language in other ways. Allied to this problem is the belief that compulsion – despite the clear evidence to the contrary – is a sort of meta-solution to the decline of indigenous languages, which it manifestly is not. Dr Paul Moon is Professor of History at AUT. His new book, Killing Te Reo Māori: An Indigenous Language Facing Extinction (Campus Press, 2018, ISBN 978-09941192-6-1) is now available at Unity Books.

OPENING DOORS FOR YOUNG PEOPLE TO LEARN A SECOND LANGUAGE Schools across the country will begin opening their doors to students in the coming days of the new school year. Opposition Spokesperson for Education Nikki Kaye explains what makes this year different and why this difference emphasises the need for every student to learn a second language. Every year around 10,000 or more five-year-olds start school for the first time. What is different this year, however, compared with 10 or 20 years ago, is the ethnic and cultural make-up of this cohort of new entrants. This year’s cohort will have many Kiwi children whose parents may have been born in different countries like Fiji, Samoa, China, Korea or India – to name just a few. Every year our new entrant cohort is becoming more diverse. This reflects the cultural melting pot that New Zealand has become, particularly in Auckland and other urban areas. It is important that what children are being taught in schools reflects and responds to changes in society in New Zealand and around the world. I intend to lodge a Private Members’ Bill to make sure that every child at primary and intermediate schools in New Zealand has the opportunity to learn another language.

requires schools to take reasonable steps to enable children to learn Te Reo and this will not change. It will be up to school boards to consult with their communities to determine which of the priority languages will be taught at their school. For instance, a school with a large population of Chinese students might decide to teach Mandarin. Every school will be required to teach at least one second language, but some schools may choose to offer more than one.

It is important that what children are being taught in schools reflects and responds to changes in society in New Zealand and around the world.

Speaking more than one language has enormous cognitive, cultural, social and economic benefits. Strengthening language fluency has the potential to lead to a smarter, more culturally aware nation that is better equipped to succeed domestically and internationally.

While there have been some positive steps to improve language fluency in New Zealand over the last decade, such as the development of the language strand of the curriculum, there is still more to do. My Members’ Bill will require the Education Minister to set at least 10 priority languages for schools following public consultation, and will place a requirement on the Crown to resource the provision of these languages for schools. I would expect that languages that would be consulted on would include Mandarin, French, Spanish, Korean, Pacific languages, and potentially Hindi. The Bill makes it clear that Te Reo and New Zealand Sign Language must be national priority languages. The current law

I do not underestimate the need to carefully plan and support the workforce to help deliver this policy. My Bill also requires the Government to develop a national language policy, to ensure there is a long-term strategy around issues such as training and development for teachers and access to physical and online resources.

We estimate this policy will cost approximately $160 million over four years. To put this into context, this is about six per cent of the cost of the Government’s fees-free policy. As an Opposition MP, I am focused on scrutinising Government policy and providing constructive criticism where needed, but also on offering opportunities for cross-party collaboration on key issues like this Bill. I have written to each party in Parliament asking for their support for the Bill, and I am optimistic that they will have an open mind and be willing to work with me to strengthen language learning in schools. National campaigned on this policy because it’s something we really believe in, and that’s why I’ve taken it on as my Members’ Bill. If you believe in this policy as much as I do, head to languages4schools.nz to show your support and offer your feedback on the draft Bill. EDUCATIONREVIEW.CO.NZ

NZ TEACHER 13

TERTIARY EDUCATION

TOO SOON TO DECLARE QUALIFICATIONS DEAD ROGER SMYTH tempers suggestions that qualifications are dead with some compelling evidence.

ore than 100 employers wrote an open letter making the patently obvious case that not all jobs need qualifications. The Productivity Commission, in its report on the tertiary education system, argued that government should “extend funding eligibility to students who do not intend to pursue full qualifications and remove specifications that limit the provision of short qualifications”. Meanwhile, the ever-innovative Otago Polytechnic has launched EduBits, its new microcredentials, and is working with NZQA on an evaluative trial of the approach. And, in an extraordinary speech in 2016 for the improbably named ‘Singularity University’, the chair of the New Zealand Qualifications Authority announced: “The day of the qualification is over!” – a statement met with spontaneous applause from the audience (apparently, not ironic). Meanwhile, the new Government is preparing to launch its ‘hop-on-hop-off’ study policy, which would see less emphasis put on qualification completion. So many ideas! So much energy! And all quite untainted by references to the evidence.

WHAT DO WE KNOW ABOUT THE VALUE OF QUALIFICATIONS?

Firstly: it’s obvious from dozens of studies that young people do get a benefit from qualifications. Those with qualifications earn more and have greater protection from unemployment. And the higher the level of the qualification, the higher the income and the greater the protection. That’s not to say that those benefits are entirely due to their qualifications. Or that in a different labour market and in a different qualifications landscape, those benefits would apply. But in the world we live in now, qualifications are associated with better earnings and employment protection. Secondly, in an important analysis of the employment outcomes of tertiary education published in 2009, David Scott looked at what happens to people who leave tertiary education early, having had a perfect record but not having completed a full qualification.

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Scott used sophisticated statistical analysis to compare the earnings of people who left tertiary education having passed all their courses, but not having completed a qualification, with those who did complete. Looking at younger leavers, he found that, three years after leaving study, those with a perfect record but without a qualification earned less of a premium than those with a qualification. In short, the labour market rewarded completion of a qualification by young people. But the reverse applied with older leavers – in that group, those who passed all their courses but left without finishing a qualification gained a (marginally) greater reward than those who did complete their qualification.

SO WHAT CAN WE CONCLUDE?

Gaining a qualification is important for young people. To get the benefit of tertiary study requires more than simply achieving a set of passes; it requires a qualification. But the picture is more mixed for older people re-entering study. That makes intuitive sense. Employers take account of experience as well as qualifications. Those who are young – inevitably – have less experience, certainly less relevant experience, than those who are already in the workforce. So, for young people, qualifications really matter. For young people, good qualifications give breadth of knowledge; they develop generic skills (not simply knowledge on the topic of study); they are portable and hence increase the dynamism of the labour market. Qualifications are subsidised by the government because they give a benefit to the labour market and to learners, not just to the employer. (That’s the justification for the differential funding rates in

industry training – qualifications create greater public value and so are funded at a higher rate than ‘traineeships’, where trainees undertake components of qualifications without necessarily seeking a full qualification and where a greater share of the benefit is captured by employers.) But for those who study later in their lives after having time in employment, the picture is mixed. David Scott’s work suggests that, for some older people, it may pay to study only what they need to learn, rather than a whole qualification. That squares with another important study: Sarah Crichton and Sylvia Dixon looked at the effect of qualification completion for graduates who had already been in the workforce before going into study. Crichton and Dixon compared those graduates with a matched group – a group of people who were similar to the graduates except in not having undertaken further study. The comparison showed that women didn’t gain an earnings benefit from their qualification unless it was at bachelor’s level or higher. Men actually had an earnings penalty from completing a qualification below bachelor’s – that is, those who gained a qualification fell below their peers who didn’t study. Men gained a small benefit from completion of a bachelor’s qualification and a more substantial gain from a master’s degree. Both the Scott study and the Crichton and Dixon analysis are old and used a limited dataset. With better data and a longer time series, with the renewed focus on the value of qualifications, with the arrival of interest in micro-credentials, now

TERTIARY EDUCATION

For young people, good qualifications give breadth of knowledge; they develop generic skills (not simply knowledge on the topic of study); they are portable and hence increase the dynamism of the labour market. is the time for the government agencies to renew, update and deepen the analysis of the evidence on the value of small fragments of learning. It would be good to see the policy thinkers catch this wave.

LIFELONG LEARNING

The research findings discussed above raise the question of ‘lifelong learning’ – adult education, continuing education, professional development, skills training. Lifelong learning is a means of boosting productivity, reducing human capital depreciation, and improving workers’ outcomes in the labour market. Given the apparently low financial return on study for those in work, and given the evident importance of a full qualification as a person’s initial tertiary education, one of the options for the experiments in micro-credentials that are unfolding may be lifelong learning. In the recent Survey of Adult Skills, New Zealanders in employment had high take-

up of further education – the third highest of all participating countries. The greatest barrier to the take-up? Time: people reported they were too busy at work, couldn’t fit extra learning around family responsibilities or found that the courses they wanted were at inconvenient times or locations. If time is important and the returns on extra learning are low, then full, long qualifications won’t fit workers’ lifelong learning needs. It was encouraging to see that Otago Polytechnic appears to have pitched its initial EduBits offerings to the lifelong learning market.

THE IMPORTANCE OF QUALIFICATIONS IN REGULATED OCCUPATIONS

A further value of qualifications is how they work in regulated occupations. I feel safer if the electrical work in my home is completed by someone who knows the whole job, not merely the immediate task. One part of the cure for leaky homes was to strengthen the qualifications of builders. The Education Council wants to investigate longer, not shorter qualifications for teachers.

When I was facing surgery, I was enormously comforted by the sight, in the frame behind the surgeon’s left shoulder, of the University of Otago MB ChB and, over his right shoulder, his certificate of membership of the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons. The butcher and the surgeon both know mammalian anatomy and both learn to wield a knife. The difference is that the surgeon has to keep the patient alive – and that requires an understanding of medicine, physiology and a thousand other disciplines with names I can neither remember nor pronounce. That requires breadth. It’s a bit soon to announce the death of the qualification. Roger Smyth has 30 years’ experience working in tertiary education – initially in senior management in a university and later in the Ministry of Education. At the Ministry, he managed the Tertiary Sector Performance Analysis team and then took over as Group Manager, Tertiary Education Policy. He retired from the Ministry in April last year and now works as an independent adviser on and contractor in tertiary education.

Educators: the only people who lose sleep over other people’s children. Alfie Kohn

Education Central .co.nz Informs. Inspires. Educates.

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NZ TEACHER 15

DYSLEXIA

DOING SOMETHING ABOUT DYSLEXIA The Government is poised to make changes to provide better screening and support for children with dyslexia, reports JODY HOPKINSON.

ignificant changes to how the education system helps children with dyslexia and dyscalculia in the classroom are coming and not a moment too soon, says Associate Minister of Education Tracey Martin. “Parents and children have been mucked around for years around this – I’m not going to muck them around anymore. “For too long, kids in schools at most would get an assessment when they were young, then possibly a reader and writer to help them with their NCEA when they were 15 if they were lucky. In the meantime, they’ve spent all that time thinking they’re stupid. They’re not stupid. It’s just a processing issue.” In 2016 the Education and Science Select Committee issued its report from its inquiry into the identification and support for students with the significant challenges of dyslexia, dyspraxia and autism spectrum disorders (ASD) in primary and secondary schools. NZ First, Labour and the Green Party said National did not go far enough and subsequently released 29 recommendations in a Minority report. Martin was a member of the select committee. The planned changes from that report include:

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1. Parents will no longer have to pay for a diagnosis. 2. Widening the entry level screening at five and six to include children’s formative tests at the age of seven and eight. Students need a certain level of oral language to be accurately assessed for dyslexia. 3. Help for all students to be the best they can be by providing support such as texts with a blue background rather than white, and a black border; and reading pens for those who need them. The Ministry is to find out how many students have dyslexia, said Martin. “We don’t expect teachers to be experts on dyslexia, but we will be upskilling teaching staff to be able to spot if a child might need some extra assessment. They will then highlight that to a Special Education Needs Coordinator (SENCO) who can then refer the child to another expert. “There has not been enough resourcing of dyslexia and dyscalculia across the board in schools. Too much of the responsibility to have their child assessed, and then how to help them, fell on parents. That is not to be the case anymore. I will be asking the Minister

of Education Chris Hipkins to work out how many SENCOs we have in our schools; if they’re overworked, if we need more SENCOs and how they can best act as liaisons for students with processing issues. “I am working on the assumption that we need more SENCOs. We need to know if there is a shortage and if so, how do we get more in.” The changes are being welcomed by many of the organisations who have been supporting those with dyslexia and their families including the New Zealand Dyslexia Foundation and the not-for-profit organisation SPELD NZ that provides information assessment and tuition to families, whānau, businesses and other individuals living with dyslexia and other specific learning disabilities (SLDs). SPELD has been at the coal face helping those with dyslexia for too long now, says executive officer Jeremy Drummond. “SPELD has long held that investment by the government in the education of people with SLDs is a social investment. “Often learning difficulties become behavioural difficulties, and some of those who are never helped with their dyslexia may end up on a benefit and or have mental health issues.

DYSLEXIA

One dollar spent today could save a million dollars in 15 or 16 years’ time.” Up until this announcement there were very few places a parent could turn to help children with their dyslexia. Many whānau were referred to SPELD by their respective schools, or families came to SPELD directly. “As a non-profit it has been a desperate situation. We have parents coming to us in tears, not knowing how to help their children. WINZ could help with a loan towards an evaluation, which via SPELD costs around $540 + GST. While other organisations stepping into the gap left by the ministry are charging up to $2,000 for an evaluation.” “Once a child is referred, SPELD teachers do an assessment and then set up a remedial plan for that child.” Dyslexia was only acknowledged by the Ministry of Education as an actual condition in 2007, Drummond said. “So, amidst fundraising and assessments, our teachers still encounter hostility from some schools. We had a principal who stormed into a SPELD office, threw down the assessment from SPELD, and said, ‘Stop encouraging people to believe in something that doesn’t exist!’ Yet another SPELD teacher overheard an assistant principal and a principal in the staff room saying dyslexia doesn’t exist – it’s just a case of ‘over-achieving mothers compensating for underachieving kids’.” He said kids with dyslexia develop a persona to cope with their inability to process information in the classroom. “They may end up with anxiety or act as the class clown or opt out when they’re being mocked and ridiculed because people make fun of them because they can’t read.” Drummond explains that, fundamentally, dyslexics have very poor phonemic understanding. If they don’t understand the 40 basic sounds of the alphabet, they can’t relate to basic sounds and syllables and don’t know how to read. He says they recommend not basing reading on phonemics. “A student with dyscalculia struggles in another way. When we see five dots on a page you or I see five dots. Somebody with dyscalculia sees 30 or 13 dots for example. They must count them individually to know there are five dots.” Drummond explains that they regularly receive calls from employers who want help for their employees who are very bright but are struggling with reading and writing. Or they’ll have employees who are fabulous at what they do but are hitting a glass ceiling because of their processing skills which prevent them from going beyond manual or menial work.

“We do get a number of queries from schools because they are struggling. It’s been a crazy situation where parents have to pay for the assessment once referred by the school. It is an educational right of ALL children to graduate with core literacy, but we have had 10 per cent of a school population being referred to a charity.” Often, as Drummond points out, dyslexia runs in families, so a single parent could get a loan from WINZ that they must then pay back out of their benefit, to help go towards one child’s assessment – but not be able to afford the cost of her other children to get assessed. Wellington student Matthew Strawbridge hated being called dumb, stupid and lazy when he was struggling in primary school. Now aged 18, after getting A pluses at Victoria University in his philosophy paper, he is putting his studies on hold to run his business Dyslexia Potential, which, among other things, runs workshops for children with dyslexia. “I couldn’t believe that when I announced my workshop for kids with dyslexia it sold out – only 20 spaces were available, and one woman flew her grandson up from Gore to attend.” His story is a testament to why awareness, acceptance and support are so essential for children living with a learning difference. “When my parents and teacher first noticed I was struggling with reading and writing I had my eyes tested. I could talk well but when it came to written work I had no idea. There was a teacher who had the capacity to engage with me and realised that I understood when taught verbally. When my sight and hearing tests came back fine, we were told I was probably dyslexic.” Strawbridge was around eight years old when he took the Woodcock-Johnson Tests of Cognitive Abilities, which confirmed his dyslexia. He explains that every dyslexic is a bit different, and that in his case deciphering each letter was like a word-find puzzle. “When I was reading or writing, it wasn’t that every word was blurry, it was every letter within the word. I had to distinguish every letter one letter at a time, then figure out what word that might spell. “In your early school years, the focus is on reading, writing and maths for six hours a day, which is a long time when you’re young. As a result, I couldn’t do anything right, day after day. I began to say, ‘I’m stupid, I can’t read’. I had no self-

“Adaptability is a key strength in the new economy and dyslexics have spent years problem solving day in, day out. We are an asset.”

belief. When I was seven I began to get stomach problems and my personality changed. My parents were shocked when the doctor said your son is most likely depressed.” Strawbridge’s parents told him about his uncle who was a veterinarian and had opened seven veterinary clinics. “Their encouragement was great. They’d say to me ‘you’re actually too smart -– your brain is going too fast’. And they told me ‘when school gets harder, you’ll get better because the work will have caught up to your brain”. In year 9 I used to get 30 per cent in business studies, then later on I topped the class.” He says it was a matter of recognising his strengths and using them to overcome his weaknesses. “I’m really good at asking for help, and I really struggle with filling out forms manually. At university I get pre-readings of lectures. When I’m writing an essay, I use Grammarly and spell checkers. I can’t hear the mistakes when I read out my work, so I have a programme which reads out my essay to me and then I can hear the difference.” When Strawbridge began Dyslexia Potential, he was inundated. “I had no idea there was almost no support for dyslexics out there. As well as the workshops, I’ve put together an online programme of 23 different lessons to help kids with their reading and writing. “The website also shares the stories of inventors and entrepreneurs who have dyslexia. When kids hear that the likes of Richard Branson and Einstein have dyslexia, they feel great. I know that feeling of growing up with dyslexia – you feel stupid the whole time – and I vowed when I was 13 that not one more kid with dyslexia would feel like that.” He sees kids transformed in his workshops. “Kids come in holding their mum and dad’s legs, are very shy and don’t want to be there. Being with other kids with dyslexia, they realise they are not the only one. When I first said, ‘Now let’s do spelling’, I was nearly booed out of my own workshop! But we worked in teams and taught them how to spell in fun ways and they loved it. “People with dyslexia have superpowers because we are superb problem solvers. We’re faced with a white board with words floating around on it for example. So we must solve that problem by getting a teacher to email the notes to us. Adaptability is a key strength in the new economy and dyslexics have spent years problem solving day in, day out. We are an asset.”

“We don’t expect teachers to be experts on dyslexia, but we will be upskilling teaching staff to be able to spot if a child might need some extra assessment.”

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NZ TEACHER 17

CHARTER SCHOOLS

WHAT TO DO WITH

CHARTER SCHOOLS ALWYN POOLE says the legislative changes that are required to allow the effective continuation of charter schools are obvious.

ne of the challenges for the relatively new Government in 2018 is what to do with charter schools. The Prime Minister and the Minister of Education appear intent on transitioning charter schools to becoming special character schools. This is highly ironic, as the Villa Education Trust investigated the special character school pathway years ago (under a previous Labour government) and was firmly rebuffed. Further, on 30 July last year I met briefly with Jacinda Ardern, who said, “You have shown us the inadequacy of our special character school policy.” During question time in Parliament recently, the Prime Minister put some conditions on the continuation of charter schools that are easily – and already – met by these schools. These are that the schools: have registered teachers. This is already the case, with exceptions similar to the recently expanded state school exceptions for Limited Authorities to Teach. teach The New Zealand Curriculum. This is also already the case. operate on the same cost to taxpayers as state schools. This is the case already in terms of annual operations for the equivalent size, decile and year level.

Given that the Prime Minister has mentioned no other change requirements for the schools and has acknowledged the inadequacy of the special character school policy, the changes needed to the policy/legislation become very obvious: 1. Allow the continuation of the ownership and governance structures of the current charter schools. They have shown a clear need in New Zealand for privately operated and state-funded niche schools effectively reaching students and families who are otherwise failing. 2. Allow the continuation of bulk funding for these schools. This is what gives the schools choices with provision of services to families and the structure of the school day, etc. This comes at absolutely no extra cost to the taxpayer and has not been mentioned as being any issue by the new Government. 3. Allow teachers in special character schools to be outside the national award; i.e. able to be individually contracted. Again, this gives flexibility that allows a more differentiated model (including day structure, contact hours and providing incentives to work with ‘priority learners’). This also creates no extra cost to the taxpayer. This is a policy that needs growth and enhancement. The changes required are cost neutral and highly beneficial to the children and families who are clearly making progress under this model. The Government may also have to look at better establishment and expansion funding and processes, which are a mess under the current Partnership Schools policy. Charter schools are woefully funded for establishment (approximately five per cent of state schools) and not funded at all for expansion. Hence, for example, South Auckland Middle School has huge waitlists but no adequate contractual provision to solve this. Education Minister Chris Hipkins has done a good thing by publicly guaranteeing the future of the nine-student ($330,000 per student) Salisbury School in Nelson. He attempted to state that he was also being generous by guaranteeing the continuation of the charter schools until the end of 2018. In fact, under the contractual structure he had very little choice. The 1,200 children/families currently attending charter schools need the same intelligent compassion he has shown Salisbury. He needs to publicly declare that the changes above will be worked through and that he, the Prime Minister and the Government will ensure that this type of school continues to thrive. Alwyn Poole is the founder of Villa Education Trust, which operates charter schools South Auckland Middle School and Middle School West Auckland.

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TEACHER EDUCATION

EDUCATING TEACHERS FOR A

COMPLEX WORLD

Two recent reports focus on newly graduated teachers and how they fare in the classroom. MELISSA WASTNEY talks to two leaders of teacher education programmes about the consistency of teacher training across the country.

report by the Education Review Office (ERO) has found that many trained teachers are walking into their first job feeling unprepared for its demands. The Education Council also released a report that recommends strengthening the quality of teacher training programmes offered, and ensuring newly graduated teachers (NGTs) have access to high-quality mentoring. For Newly Graduated Teachers: Preparation and Confidence to Teach, ERO surveyed 279 recent graduates in early childhood education and 561 recent graduates in schools through an online survey and face-to-face interviews. The online survey was positive, with more than 80 per cent of NGTs reporting they felt confident in their knowledge of both subject content and teaching methods. But in the interviews, many respondents reported a disconnect between what they had learned and the practical experience of standing in front of a class of students. ERO also interviewed principals and head teachers at 118 schools and 109 early learning services. Both these leaders and the NGTs “highlighted classroom and behaviour management as an area that needed more support”.

It also emphasised concerns about the consistency of teacher training across the country. While Initial Teacher Education (ITE) was confined for many years to colleges in the six university centres, it was deregulated in the 1990s and aspiring teachers can now choose between 25 institutions. ERO chief review officer Nicholas Pole told the New Zealand Herald that the large number of institutions made teacher training “quite disaggregated’’, but ERO found no agreement on which educational institutions were not performing. “We asked principals which providers are better, but we didn’t get any consistency,” he said. Professor and head of school at the University of Canterbury’s School of Teacher Education Letitia Fickel says this inconsistency may reflect the way in which the study was conducted. “One of the challenges with the report is that we don’t know what kind of sampling method was used,” she says. “There are multiple providers and great variations in how they go about ITE and what their outcomes are. While there was a good number of new teachers, centre leaders and principals surveyed, there was no real certainty as to whether

it was a representative sample from the range of existing providers. To what extent does the report really speak for the whole ITE sector?” Fickel says the findings come as no surprise, partly because at Canterbury’s School of Teacher Education students are regularly surveyed, as are principals and centre leaders. “A lot of our knowledge has come from feedback we’ve received from our students and sector colleagues. We’ve been running a graduate survey for many years and so are well aware of the complexities of preparing teachers for a changing education system,” she says. The way that schools are continually evolving to keep up with a changing society is an important key to the complexities behind the ERO report. “Over the last 15 years, society has actually asked teachers to work in very different ways than we might have in the past. For example, we have a better understanding that there are young people in our schools who have not been progressing at the kind of levels we would like to see – we do have gaps in student outcomes. We’ve been asked to make sure these gaps don’t continue to occur. “At the same time, we have a growing and diverse population, and our schools need to be far

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TEACHER EDUCATION

more inclusive and focus on identity, culture and language,” she says. Fickel highlights work being done at the University of Canterbury to forge stronger links with schools, centres and community partners, such as Ngāi Tahu iwi to better reflect Māori aspirations. Post-earthquake Christchurch has seen school rebuilds and increased introduction of modern learning environments. The introduction of Communities of Learning has seen teacher trainees learn through collaboration and experience community work in a new way. “We’ve seen many of our schools being revisioned as flexible, or responsive learning environments. We’ve taken up a blended learning model, and we’re ensuring that our graduates have had practical experience in all these types of different schools.” A teacher’s role is complex, and one that is always changing. “It’s now about being part of a team that’s focused on all the young people in the school and teachers also have responsibility to whānau and wider community. In our programme, we’ve addressed this by creating opportunities for our students to meet and interact with whānau through community-engaged learning opportunities.” “I believe our preservice teachers take responsibility for making a positive difference in their community.” The importance of high-quality in-service mentoring is mentioned in both reports, and Fickel says this is critical. “The reports identified a challenge that many of us have long known – the associate teacher role. This is where an experienced teacher mentors a new one, and it’s sort of an expected part of the profession. “The goodwill to mentor is definitely there, though it’s become more challenging for teachers to take it on in recent years because of all the changes happening in schools and centres. “Especially in Christchurch with the rebuilds and other changes, schools are in flux. We do offer professional development to those taking it on. But it’s another thing that needs to be done at the end of the school day. “To lead the learning of another person requires a special skill set – it’s not necessarily the same skills required to be a classroom teacher.

“I believe we need to better acknowledge and support this role and work out how to better resource it as a professional pathway. And this will require a system approach, as the Education Council has suggested.” Dr Fiona Ell is head of initial teacher education at the University of Auckland and, like Professor Fickel, she describes teacher education as something that is complex and continually changing. “In New Zealand and internationally we are all trying to solve two puzzles: how to better prepare teachers for the complexity of the classroom and

soon as they graduate: they do small tasks as part of a team and responsibility is gradually released to them. Also, they do ‘professionals’ – additional study which their professions expect to have to add to their basic preparation. “No-one is calling for ‘on the job’ preparation for lawyers or engineers – we know their work is intellectually demanding and we want them to be graduates – and then we expect them to have to learn more about the practicalities of their work. “The preparation of teachers would be improved by a similar approach. We are always looking to improve our practice, and structural changes such as giving NGTs roles without class responsibility in their first year could make a difference.” Changes are afoot at the University of Auckland, with a new suite of qualifications set to be delivered in 2019. “Changes include more intentional use of professional experience in schools to build practice, more emphasis on identity, language and culture as key to connecting with learners and building respect with diverse communities, collaboration with colleagues (for modern learning environments), and digital teaching and learning,” says Ell. But the changing nature of the education system remains a constant consideration, and teachers must model the lifelong learning they aspire to instill in students. “If we prepare people to teach for today, their preparation will be of little use later in their careers. We emphasise the development of adaptive expertise – the ability to grow and learn and make professional decisions in a range of contexts. Teaching is essentially a series of highstakes, complex decisions – each of which needs a lot of knowledge to make. “Any teacher preparation can only begin a teacher’s professional learning journey, so we need to prepare teachers to be learners throughout their careers – and to expect to have more to learn every year that they teach,” says Ell.

“The reports identified a challenge that many of us have long known – the associate teacher role. This is where an experienced teacher mentors a new one, and it’s sort of an expected part of the profession.”

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how to provide teachers who can consistently improve outcomes for learners,” she says. “Current calls are for ‘more professional experience’ – past solutions have been more qualifications, and in fact the last government commissioned ‘exemplary teacher education programme’ pilots which blended both: a master’slevel qualification with more practice time in schools. “ERO’s report echoes reports from the 1950s, 1970s and more recent decades as it rediscovers that early career teachers often do not remember what they covered in their programmes, or that when faced with the overwhelming nature of teaching what they know seems inadequate. This is a career-long challenge for teachers.” Teaching is one of few professions where we expect new graduates to do the whole job from their first day, says Ell. “New lawyers, architects and engineers are rarely put in charge of an important project as

To view the ERO and Education Council reports, go to www.ero.govt.nz/publications and www.educationcouncil.org.nz/content/future-focusedinitial-teacher-education.

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EDUCATION TRENDS

WHAT CAN NEW TEACHERS EXPECT IN

2018?

JAY ALLNUTT discusses the current key trends affecting education in New Zealand and the impacts that these have on teaching, learning and schools.

n 1916 John Dewey, the great liberal education reformer, wrote: “If we teach today’s students as we taught yesterday’s, we rob them of tomorrow”. Notwithstanding the rapid transformation and uncertainty that took place during Dewey’s lifetime, the world that we live in today is already transforming faster and in more fundamental ways. So what do those entering the teaching profession for the first time in 2018 need to be aware of? What are the distinct trends that are affecting learning (what children need to learn, their expectations for learning, and how they go about learning), teaching (how, what and the context in which we teach, as well as who teachers are), and schools (their purpose, structure and responsibilities)? And how should these trends influence how teachers prepare for the profession? The following key trends affecting education in 2018 are not mutually exclusive; in many cases they are not new or unique to 2018. The world is characterised by complexity, inter-connectedness and emergence, and these massive, long-term trends embody this. How well we understand and deal with them will determine how well we prepare children for their future.

KEY TRENDS AFFECTING EDUCATION

It would seem strange to start without acknowledging that digital technologies are probably the most visible sign of change. Technology is transforming our lives in a disruptive way, given its rate of development and increasing prevalence and accessibility. We are no longer merely augmenting our ways of existing in the world, but are being forced by digital technologies to adapt to new ways of living. This is illustrated clearly, for instance, in the changing nature of work through automation, as well as in how we communicate and connect with one another. And as with changes to work, this brings both risks and opportunities. Specifically, in education we have the opportunity for more personalised learning experiences that are tailored to children’s individual needs and interests using new technology. Conversely, the continuing digital divide might mean that we entrench and increase the inequality that already pervades education if we assume all children have the same access to these technologies. How long this rate of development continues and what a plateau looks like is a matter for

debate. But some key questions we face are: How do we maximise the opportunities that digital technologies present for learning, and what are the limits? How do we provide students with advanced skills that are well beyond our own competencies? How does the internet affect how we use knowledge and recall it? How does technology affect the interconnectedness between school and the outside world?

We have to think about how we will prepare children for a world – and not just the world of work – that is increasingly interconnected, so that they can hold their own with others around the world. Technology is not evolving in a vacuum. Globalisation is speeding up and deepening connections across the globe. We see this, for instance, in immigration and economic integration with other countries. By global standards, Aotearoa New Zealand is minimally regulated and a large proportion of its population was born overseas. For teaching, we have to look both outwards and inwards. We have to think about how we will prepare children for a world – and not just the world of work – that is increasingly interconnected, so that they can hold their own with others around the world. We need to do this while supporting those who are arriving in this multicultural country for the first time, and providing an education system that serves a diversifying population without exacerbating inequality. Globalisation is also concerned with those global trends which no individual country can address alone. Perhaps chief among these are environmental concerns, including both the effects

of pollution and climate changes, and conserving and restoring Aotearoa’s natural habitats. What roles do schools have in contributing to this effort, and how should we engage children? The other side of globalisation is the role of New Zealand as a nation and the part that teachers and schools play in this. As the world and our population grows, ages and diversifies, education is competing alongside other demands on the national purse, such as health and security. How might schools help to address these other emerging risks? What difference might this make to how education is delivered, and to access for people outside of compulsory education, such as excluded children and adults? Crucially, how do these changes affect our perceptions and expectations of teachers, and how do we manage these expectations? Specifically, how do new teachers manage these demands to ensure they are able to deliver for the young people with the breadth that is expected? As the world, and New Zealand, continues to become more urban, how will schools adapt and grow sufficiently, and what might this mean for the ways in which learning and teaching takes place within them? Auckland is already facing significant challenges common to similar cities: a housing crisis, inequality, poverty and exclusion. This raises questions about how cities take stronger leads in determining how we address these things, and how schools, teachers and students can collaborate across them. And how do we do these things while seeing difference as an asset, not a deficit? At the more micro level, the way we live our lives as families has changed. Conventions of marriage and divorce, when we have children, and the diversity of couples across ethnic, gender and nationality lines affect the context within which children grow up. How should teachers adapt their approaches to working with (extended) families? And how might families’ expectations for connecting with schools change, especially if learning becomes more accessible from home? How these trends influence schools, teaching and learning will determine the experience of new teachers entering the profession this year. How well we plan for them will determine the extent to which we support all children to live fulfilled and happy lives. Jay Allnutt is a former teacher and CEO of the charity Teach First NZ: Ako Mātātupu, which offers an employment-based teaching and education leadership programme that works to attract new people into the education system, working in schools serving low-income communities across Aotearoa New Zealand.

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TECHNOLOGY

THE NEW TECHNOLOGIES SET TO ENTER YOUR CLASSROOM IN 2018 From artificial intelligence to mixed reality, MEI LIN LOW shares the technologies we can expect to see more of in our classrooms this year.

ith the Labour-led New Zealand Government confirming that digital technology will be added to the school curriculum for years 1 to 10, the role of technology and its influence within education is top of mind for many. How can technology engage students to improve learning outcomes? How can it be used as a professional tool for educators to improve workplace efficiencies in areas like content planning, knowledge management and professional learning? With this in mind, here are some technologies we should expect to see more of within classrooms during the next 12 months.

INTELLIGENCE IN EDUCATION (AIEd) 1ARTIFICIAL

Integration of Artificial Intelligence in Education (AIEd) is gaining momentum. A recent report by Pearson analysed how AIEd will transform education. Imagine the possibilities of each student having their own virtual learning assistant or ‘bot’ powered by AI that can support a student throughout their studies, creating a personalised learning journey. Or new assessment models that measure performance in real time and can adapt content accordingly. We are starting to see this in more intelligent app platforms with student, parent and teacher portals that track progress in real time – from subject-specific tools like Math Whizz and Mathletics through to PaCT (Progress and Consistency Tool), which is designed to help teachers track the progress students are making in reading, writing and mathematics.

2 IMMERSIVE EXPERIENTIAL LEARNING With BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) now standard in many schools, providing students with highspeed internet connectivity to the outside world through devices like tablets and smartphones is becoming ‘education essential’. This has led to wider use of virtual reality technologies, creating truly immersive learning experiences both inside

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and outside the classroom. Tools like Microsoft’s HoloLens, Google Expedition and Windows 10’s Mixed Reality Viewer are continuing to change the way subjects are taught. They allow students and educators to engage with content and remotebased experts in new ways, blending the real and virtual worlds.

THE HYPER-COLLABORATIVE CLASSROOM

Using video collaboration and digital content sharing to deliver on-demand or personalised learning, provide access to experts, and enable remote-based students to attend school continues to be mainstream. Imagine if the next step for students, teachers and schools was to go from being ‘collaborative’ amongst themselves to being ‘hyper-collaborative’ – bringing together knowledge, capabilities and ideas from different industries, ecosystems and geographies. A great example of this is happening right now in Australia: major corporates are backing a new educational ‘Women in STEM’ programme, connecting female students with real-life mentors in the corporate world via an online platform that allows them to see what happens in real time within the business world. For 2018 and beyond, it is anticipated more educators will be willing to embrace the idea of ‘anywhere learning’ within the classroom. Enabling students to learn the way they want, where they want and in a hyper-collaborative manner.

4 SMART CAMPUSES IN THE CLOUD

In the same way that we’ve seen AI technologies and machine-led learning drive the Smart Home movement, we are seeing a similar move towards creating Smart Campuses. This involves harnessing ICT excellence in the areas of sourcing, management and accountability, catering to a diverse range of needs from learners, to educators and campus administrative teams. Market analyst IDC also suggests that central education organisations will also aim to leverage the benefits

of cloud-based technologies to drive cost savings and operational efficiencies through increased cloud-related IT consolidation and shared services initiatives.

GROWS FROM STRENGTH TO STRENGTH 5CODING

Coding continues to grow in popularity and the way it’s taught is evolving fast. We are also seeing a much-needed increase in private sector technology partners developing innovative educational content, provide guest expertise and knowledge transfer. Microsoft continues to develop its Minecraft coding programmes where students get to learn how to code in real time inside the game. Today, this learning experience is widely available through Microsoft’s MakeCode for Minecraft on Windows 10. Many other companies are also investing in coding for kids, producing everything from STEM starter kits to accelerate design thinking and logic to professional e-modules for teachers to ensure they have the tools to teach coding within the classroom.

SCIENCE FICTION OR REALITY?

As these 2018 ‘edu-tech trends’ suggest, the way we learn and manage our education environments is continuing to evolve rapidly. Even though new technologies like artificial intelligence, bots and virtual learning assistants may still feel like science fiction for many, they will soon be as familiar as using iPads or connecting with students in a video meeting room. We need to get prepared now to ensure teachers and students are ready to harness the potential of these new technologies in the classroom and ultimately the workplace of the future. As a director at Polycom Asia Pacific, Mei Lin Low is a technologist and advocate for business transformation in industries, including education and healthcare, through video, voice and collaboration tools.

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MODERN LEARNING ENVIRONMENTS

FUTURE-FOCUSED SPACES FOR FUTURE-FOCUSED LEARNERS

t was Socrates who said, “Education is the kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel”. The flame is being lit for learners across New Zealand and Australia thanks to BFX’s support in creating flexible and purposeful learning spaces. The Ministry of Education’s current Property Policy discusses the need for spaces that are future focused – but for every school the journey will be different, according to their pedagogical approach. The prospect of creating diverse spaces to suit the many and varied needs of all learners can be as daunting as it is exciting. That’s why BFX recommends an under-furnishing approach at the beginning of your school’s journey. Schools will soon find the spaces which students choose most often. It is far easier to add than subtract items, and of course better to avoid unnecessary spend. BFX’s school furniture design and manufacturing business began in a humble shed in 1980. Fast forward to 2018 and their site is clearly more futurefocused in a purpose-built and continuously expanding facility. It is here that their dedicated research department operates and here where they developed and patented the design of SmarTables™, a table selection that can be quickly and easily adapted to suit the various learning activities on any given day. Easily height-adjustable for every year level, with fully welded frames for durability, SmarTables are agile and mobile for easy movement and flexibility. They’re also available in a range of colours to inspire learning and creativity. Corpus Christi School couldn’t be happier with the SmarTables they purchased for their learners. “When they see this beautiful furniture – the quality of it – it really inspires them around their learning … we wanted to create an agile space, with flexible furniture that could be moved easily,” says principal Kerrie Piatek. To achieve the best value for their expenditure, schools need to ensure that their choices today can meet their needs tomorrow. With most items having a minimum seven-year warranty – the Pozzi classroom chair even has a market-leading 15-year warranty – BFX is helping schools to make their expenditure last. Local specialists can advise and assist schools with choosing furniture to suit their learning environments. They will help schools through sizing and space combinations, so that the end solution is tailored to meet the needs of the school and its learners.

This can be achieved with the help of BFX’s 3D Room Planner, which allows schools to visualise and explore their spaces. The app can be used individually, in groups, or with students, to plan spaces collaboratively. It can be accessed at www.bfx.com.au/lp/bfx-3d-room-planner. BFX is committed to supporting schools in their individual journey to create flexible and purposeful future-focused learning spaces. They also have many standard products in stock that can be delivered within the same week they are ordered, allowing schools to get on with their business – inspiring futurefocused learners for their world ahead.

BFX’s first warehouse.

BFX’s warehouse today.

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NZ TEACHER 23

TECHNOLOGY

SHOULD WE MAKE WAY FOR THE

TEACHERBOTS? Will teacherbots applied with artificial intelligence be doing our job one day? Will they do it better than us? JUDE BARBACK takes stock of some of the recent thinking around the future of education.

“Over the coming decades, if we continue to insert a teacher between us and everything we need to learn, we cannot possibly learn fast enough to meet the demands of the future.”

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photograph of Times Square in New York City taken in 1905 appears on the screen. There are countless horses, carting people around or tied up. The horses provided employment for some 10,000 people in New York City, Don Carlson, director of Microsoft Asia-Pacific tells the audience at last year’s Bett Asia conference in Kuala Lumpur. He then changes the image. The second photo is also of Times Square, but taken 20 years later. And there is not a horse in sight. “When people say we need to bring back the coal industry, are we effectively saying, ‘bring back the horses’?” asks Carlson. The world of work is changing, due to new and emerging technology. There are countless examples to prove it. A Chatbot lawyer saved 160,000 parking fines in London and New York. A 30-storey hotel in China was assembled in 360 hours, thanks to advances in prefabrication technology. Nike can make and tweak shoe prototypes in hours, thanks to 3D printing. McDonald’s is using cognitive technology to convert drive-through orders to text that can be fed directly into the outlet’s point-of-sale system. But all these efficiencies beg questions about what is beginning to happen to the jobs of people making shoes, or taking orders, or fighting legal cases. According to futurist Thomas Frey, the profession of teaching could also be under threat. Frey predicts two billion jobs will disappear by 2030. Among those on the doomed list are teachers, along with those working in the power and transportation industries. Frey says that nearly a quarter of all kids don’t attend school at all and he estimates we are short 18 million teachers globally. “There simply aren’t enough teachers at the right time and place to satisfy our growing thirst for knowledge. “Over the coming decades, if we continue to insert a teacher between us and everything we need to learn, we cannot possibly learn fast enough to meet the demands of the future.” Frey says we have started shifting away from teacher-centric schooling to more of a learning model, where ‘place’ isn’t as important. Teaching requires experts, he says. Teacherless education uses experts to create the material, but doesn’t require the expert to be present each time it’s presented.

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Frey says we’re standing on the brink of an artificial intelligence (AI) revolution. He talks about a world where we could see teacherbots applied with AI that have the ability to learn each student’s interests, preferred tools and ways of learning. The AI will let the bot know when a skill is deficient, what’s needed to address the deficiency and when we’ve addressed it. Brad McBean argues in Aurecon’s Just Imagine blog that while our jobs may be at risk of being automated, humans will remain an essential ingredient in the future workplace equation. The role of human creativity and ingenuity will keep rising to the top. Creative thinking will always remain gold. “McKinsey’s latest report on automation displacement reminds us that, although almost every occupation has partial automation potential, humans will remain an essential ingredient in the future workplace equation. Even those jobs that can be easily automated, such as nursing or teaching, rely heavily on interactions between people and expertise that stretches beyond the knowledge of facts.” Although teaching was on Frey’s list of jobs that would disappear, coaching was on the list of jobs that would be sought-after in the future. This indicates a shift in the role, rather than replacement. However, founder of Learning without Frontiers Graham Brown-Martin believes we need to take a different approach to education altogether. Brown-Martin says for decades our education system has been relying on instructionalism – when the teacher (expert) communicates knowledge to the students (novices). He believes the introduction of technology has not essentially changed anything, rather it has converted this approach to digital instructionalism. He points to the philosophies of Seymour Papert of MIT Media Lab, who talked about learning as constructionism – the act of constructing knowledge from information. Where instructionalism holds that the mind processes and mirrors the world, constructionism is about the mind perceiving and constructing reality, impacted by individual perception and experience. Brown-Martin believes we should be placing reconstructionism at the heart of our education systems. Reconstructionism is where teaching and learning is a process of inquiry that allows the child to invent and reinvent the world, where the curriculum focuses on student experience and taking social action on real problems. He values small data over big data, in other words talking to the individual student to get a sense of their needs, rather than relying on trends and statistics. Brown-Martin points to a Harvard longitudinal study that shows that the key to happiness is relationships. “Yet there is nothing in our schooling to teach relationships,” he says. Learning should focus on projects, passion, peers and play. It should happen within and across the frameworks of creative, critical and computational thinking. We need a multi-disciplinary, de-siloed approach to learning, says Brown-Martin, one that focuses on projectbased and personalised learning. “Personalisation is the key and it doesn’t involve technology.”

SCHOOL POOLS

HOW IMPORTANT ARE

SCHOOL POOLS?

ost of us remember swimming in the school pool, with the smell of chlorine and the sound of shrieking and splashing children. We might have even been lucky enough to rent a ‘pool key’ over the summer, with trips to school helping to fill the seemingly endless hot days. But what was once largely a norm in public schools is now being phased out, with dire consequences, says a sector body. Water Safety New Zealand (WSNZ) works to find funding strategies to tackle our nation’s drowning problem, which is one of the worst in the OECD. In 2016 there were 78 preventable fatalities and drowning-related hospitalisations were on the rise. WSNZ recently commissioned a study into aquatic education in schools and found that only around a quarter of primary schools provided a minimum acceptable level. Acknowledging the problem is complex due to New Zealand’s diverse and growing population and expansive network of unpatrolled waterways, WSNZ CEO Jonty Mills draws a direct connection between pools in schools and our nation’s diminishing water skills. “Around 156 school pools have closed in the last six years and a further 130 nationwide are at risk of being shut down permanently,” says Mills. “Having a school pool is like having a classroom specifically for aquatic education. Ease of access means children get to learn water safety skills in a supportive environment. When school pools close, students then have to travel to community facilities and the cost and time required can be prohibitive,” he explains. “We have certainly seen a drop in the amount of aquatic education offered at school and the

MELISSA WASTNEY asks how the phasing out of swimming pools in our schools is affecting young New Zealanders, and what is involved in keeping school pools open.

closure of school pools has certainly had an impact.”

IT’S ALL ABOUT THE MONEY

Ultimately, it comes down to cost, says Mills. “The costs associated with the upkeep and maintenance of school pools can be high and schools under financial pressure often simply cannot afford to keep them going. When pools get old and run down, the cost of bringing them back up to standard is often unaffordable without financial assistance.” The New Zealand Curriculum specifically acknowledges the importance of water skills, stating that all school students must be given the opportunity to learn essential swimming skills by the end of year 6.

“The costs associated with the upkeep and maintenance of school pools can be high and schools under financial pressure often simply cannot afford to keep them going.” Rob Giller, acting head of the Ministry of Education’s Infrastructure Service, says all schools receive funding for aquatic education as part of their annual property maintenance grant, but swimming lessons are not specifically funded. “Schools have discretion to meet this requirement in whichever way works for them, whether that be at their own school pool, a neighbouring school pool, or community facilities,” he says.

“We do not fund swimming lessons directly. Nor do we fund the capital cost of new or replacement swimming pools at schools. However, we do provide ongoing maintenance funding for pools as part of their annual property maintenance grant (PMG). Schools may also use their Ministryprovided capital works budgets for the upkeep of the pool’s essential infrastructure.” Pool maintenance is no small job. The Ministry of Education’s website outlines the costs as including pool chemicals, water, heating, painting, fencing and testing charges, a caretaker’s training and salary, cover repairs, and caring for ancillary buildings such as changing rooms and storage sheds. Instead of using an on-site pool, a number of schools are using facilities in the community to teach swimming, says Giller. “Schools without a pool can use their operations grant to help take students to a nearby swimming pool. In this context schools are responsible for delivering the curriculum and decide how their funding is spent. “In addition, many schools may use other sources of funding, such as community funding, towards the upkeep and running costs of their pools,” he says. Meanwhile, WSNZ offers a range of support to schools and whānau, such as corporate partnerships to help deliver its Water Skills for Life programme to primary-aged students, and practical help with pool maintenance. The organisation also runs a campaign called Save Our School Pools, offering support to schools applying for funding to maintain their pool.

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NZ TEACHER 25

MENTAL HEALTH

LOSING THE BATTLE:

THE DESPERATE NEED FOR MORE MENTAL HEALTH FUNDING IN SCHOOLS

ROWAN EDWARDS says we urgently need to increase funding for mental health services at primary and intermediate schools.

t one Rotorua intermediate school, the onsite social worker has met with over a third of the school population. That equates to more than 100 young people seeking help of their own accord or on the referral of others. This was within the social worker’s first term, their first 12 weeks in the role. These numbers increase daily. One teacher from the same school notes that 20 out of the 29 young people enrolled in the class have received some type of emotional/wellbeing support service. It is an overwhelming workload. But, because of a lack in funding, the availability of this social worker is split between several schools.

WORLD LEADERS IN LETTING YOUNG PEOPLE DIE

New Zealand is the undisputed champion at rugby, at sailing and at rowing. We, as a nation, are also champions at letting our young people die. This harsh fact follows a recent UNICEF report that crowns Aotearoa New Zealand as a runaway leader in failing youth who experience mental health issues – issues that often result in suicide. The report focuses on teenagers who are between the age of 15 and 19 and for that age range New Zealand’s suicide rate sits atop, undisputed and unchallenged when compared with other countries in the developed world. In numbers per 100,000 young people, 15.6 will commit suicide. Young lives, families and whānau that could be ripped apart, by rope, pill, bullet or knife. Now numbers can lie, they can con and contrive and, in the issue of youth mental health, they can conceal. The figure of 15.6 per 100,000 may not provide a shock reaction; the kind of ‘slap you in the face’ statistics flaunted by politicians or infomercials. However, to provide a broader context, New Zealand has a youth suicide rate that is twice that of the US and almost five times that of the UK. Or to look at it another way, the chances of parents having a son or daughter commit suicide are about the same as their chances of winning $55 in a New Zealand Lotto draw. When was the last time you, your family or whānau won some money from the lottery? Could you imagine if it was the other? New Zealand media is already awash with increasing reports on mental health issues particularly amongst our youth. So how do we confront this crisis that is engulfing our country, our communities? Aotearoa has a proud heritage with the number eight wire approach and in many respects our society is a success. However, this mental health

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crisis is not something to be ‘fixed’ like a car aerial or a kitchen table with an uneven leg. What young people, their family and whānau need is specialised mental health support.

MORE SPECIALIST SUPPORT NEEDED AT PRIMARY AND INTERMEDIATE LEVELS

Help is needed sooner, rather than later. Action must be taken to address this crisis from the front, not the back. What these young people need is not more ambulances at the bottom of the cliff, but more fences at the top. Funding needs to be – no, must be increased to enable greater access for intermediateaged children to these specialised services. In New Zealand a staggering 12,000 children every year between the ages of five and 14 exhibit suicidal behaviours. Many primary schools or intermediates lack adequate resources to provide a full-time counsellor, youth or social worker. This must change. I am not a trained psychologist, overworked social worker or counsellor and nor are those with whom I am attempting to take this action. Bar empathy and concern, I have no automatic right to address this ‘issue’. I am, however, soon to be a father. My beloved child, like many across Aotearoa will be born into a loving and supportive home, to parents who will have the resources to make specialist care available. Sometimes though, this is not enough. Not that children ever should, but what if a young person feels too ashamed to talk to their family or whānau about, for example, ongoing bullying or sexuality/gender confusion? They may feel they need someone else to turn to, without their perceived embarrassment of involving their caregivers.

The young people most at risk, however, are those who do not have supportive homes and/ or supportive parents. These environments, often associated with other social factors, precipitate genetic predispositions for mental health problems to show. Sadly, there are also many – too many – families who simply do not have the means to provide their much-loved children with access to the specialised support they may need to be able to keep them safe. Where better to provide this access than at a location where young people spend approximately 35 hours per week within a secure and safe environment? Adding to this, it has been proven that help in a safe environment can increase the effectiveness of care and the implementation of healthy coping mechanisms. So for many of our young people, getting this mental health support within the school environment is their only option, their only hope. Implementing these much-needed support services into all primary schools and intermediates across New Zealand would provide all our young people with the opportunity to talk and most importantly to be heard. Mental health, like loss and feeling lost, doesn’t discriminate. Let’s make support always available for all our young people. Now – before it’s too late. Rowan Edwards is a student at Massey University. You can sign his group’s petition to increase and provide adequate funding for mental health services across all intermediate and primary schools in Aotearoa New Zealand at www.change.org.

What these young people need is not more ambulances at the bottom of the cliff, but more fences at the top.

PLD

OVERSEAS EDUCATION EXPERTS TO HIT NZ SHORES IN 2018 UK EXPERT TO SHARE POSITIVE BEHAVIOUR MODEL WITH KIWI TEACHERS

iwi teachers will have the chance this year to learn about an internationally acclaimed whole school approach to wellbeing and positive behaviour. UK educational consultant, trainer and author Jenny Mosley will return to New Zealand in August to deliver a four-day ‘Train the Trainers’ residential course for early childhood, primary and secondary teachers focused on her educational model, Quality Circle Time (QCT). Delegates will be trained and become accredited trainers with the ability to deliver the training to teachers and children in their schools and locally. Mosley specialises in the non-academic areas of school life – like social skills, positive behaviour, self-esteem, active listening, lunchtimes and playtimes and keeping physically active. These areas and skills hold the whole community safely together and promote active learning. Taking a whole school approach, QCT is about strengthening wider school communities, encouraging positive behaviour and addressing mental health and wellbeing issues. Mosley says QCT fits beautifully with the PB4L (Positive Behaviour for Learning) programme and Māori education, including Kaupapa Māori (Huakina Mai and Te Mana Tikitiki), and in a broader sense, Māori Haurora. “I have worked in New Zealand schools and settings at least six times,” says Mosley. “On each trip I have met amazing people. Each time the similarity and compatibility of Quality Circle Time and the non-academic subject educational systems in New Zealand become stronger and clearer.”

To register your interest or find out more about the August 2018 Train the Trainers course, contact Jenny Whitehead, RTLB Area Coordinator jennyw@tekuiti.school.nz.

EMBRACING THE NEW WORK ORDER

oung people graduating now are likely to work in 17 different jobs – many yet unknown and unknowable – across five careers, through a working life of 60 to 70 years. AI and globalisation are expected to have massive impacts in terms of what we do and how we work, with the pace of change already underway only likely to increase. In February, chief executive of the Foundation for Young Australians Jan Owen will lead discussions on whether we are adequately preparing young people for the new work order. Hosted by the 21C Skills Lab, Jan will be joined by NetSafe’s former director of education Karen Spencer and GirlBoss Alexia Hilbertidou.

The session will feature a plenary with Jan Owen; a panel featuring leading New Zealanders working within the education system and business; a youth perspective; and exploration and ideation workshops bringing together groups around a variety of areas. These include careers guidance for young people; facilitating learning about the world of work in schools and tertiary institutions; and workplace learning and micro-credentialling. The New Work Order Series will be held on Monday 12 February 2018 in Wellington and Tuesday 13 February in Auckland. For more information, visit www.eventbrite.co.nz/e/new-work-order-learningaccelerator-with-jan-owen-am-wellingtontickets-40857072604.

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NZ TEACHER 27

RESOURCES

BRIDGING THE GAP BETWEEN RESEARCH AND PRACTICE IN EDUCATION

new digital platform is about to be launched by The Education Hub, an education not-for-profit organisation that aims to foster innovation and improvement in New Zealand schools by bridging the gap between research and practice in education. As well as readable digests summarising the latest research, the platform will include infographics, videos and animation, school case studies and examples of research being applied in New Zealand schools, interviews with researchers and checklists for teachers. “We want to make sure teachers have better access to the great research going on in New Zealand, so that their jobs are easier and students benefit,” says Dr Nina Hood, The Education Hub’s founder. A 2017 survey by The Education Hub found that more than 80 per cent of teachers struggled to keep up with latest information and innovation in teaching practice. “School teachers are very busy,” Hood says. “Our new online platform will make sure teachers have access to the information they need, in the right format, at the right time.” Key topics have been identified through research into teachers’ needs. The first five online information areas are: Assessment for learning and feedback. High-impact teaching practices, including high expectations teaching. Teaching as Inquiry and using evidence in schools. Learning skills. Science of learning, how we learn. The launch of the platform will be accompanied by a series of live events throughout the year. These will include seminars and workshops by top researchers and Q+A sessions run by expert educators, who can provide more practical strategies and support. New topics will be introduced to the online platform throughout the year, including early childhood education, digital technology, learning environments, culturally responsive pedagogy, leadership, and home-school partnerships. The Education Hub was launched in May 2017 in response to research showing there was a big gap between some of the excellent research being done in New Zealand and the findings

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Teachers’ access to reliable, relevant and actionable research will get a boost in February with the launch of a new digital platform offering free, easy-to-access resources that enhance their classroom practice.

“School teachers are very busy. Our new online platform will make sure teachers have access to the information they need, in the right format, at the right time.” being put into practice in schools. Ironically the country’s education system is hampered in its own learning, says Hood. Unlike other industries, education does not have an R&D infrastructure to support the sharing of knowledge and to facilitate system-wide innovation. The Education Hub, a small not-forprofit start-up, aims to bridge the gap between research and practice and to facilitate better opportunities and outcomes for students. Other plans for the year include establishing professional learning circles to bring teachers

together who want to explore particular topics to collaborate and share their learning and receive advice and support from experts. “It’s an exciting and slightly uncertain time for education with changing social, political and economic conditions, together with technological advancements,” says Hood. “The Education Hub exists to empower teachers to face new challenges with the very latest evidence-based thinking and practice. We look forward to supporting teachers in making change happen.”

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