This talk was delivered by Mary Chamberlain, Group Manager Curriculum Teaching and Learning Design, at the Ministry of Education in December 2010.
There are six parts to this talk:
The great news is we’ve got a high performing system. We’ve got a great system, not an excellent system yet. And why have we got a great system? PISA has consistently told us, since 2000, that our students are the highest performing in the world in reading. One in six of our young people, in reading, is achieving in that top cohort, in PISA, so that’s one in six of our fifteen year olds and we are also in the top cohorts in science and maths.
Now, there’s a challenge in there, of course, too - because when we compare ourselves with the other high performing countries we have got the longest tail of underachievement and the kinds of children who are in that tail of underachievement pose some problems for us as well. They tell us that we are not serving the needs of our Māori and Pasifika students. There are numbers of those students in the high performing, but the system is not actually helping them in the same way as it’s helping all the other students, because they’re over represented in that tail. We’ve also got an issue in sheer numbers, it’s the number of Pakeha boys in that tail. So there are a number of challenges that we need to address in order to move from a good system to an excellent system.
Published on: 03 Jun 2011
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