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2014 No 6, December

Tēnā koutou 

Many thanks for reading our last update for the 2014 year. We wish you relaxation, happiness, and fun this holiday season.

Noho ora mai rā

The NZCER Team

Holiday closure

The NZCER office will be open until 2pm on 24 December and will reopen on 5 January.

A hard-hitting new book says New Zealand can tackle educational disparity and make our secondary schools great.  But author Bali Haque says it requires a completely different approach to education reform than  in the past.

Changing our Secondary Schools is powerful critique of two decades of educational reform in New Zealand, from an educator who was deeply involved. It is also a provocative call for action.

Mr Haque has been both a secondary school principal required to implement reform and a senior public servant in the New Zealand Qualifications Authority (NZQA) tasked with pushing through changes.

The book analyses four major reforms since 1989: Tomorrow’s Schools, the NCEA, the revised New Zealand Curriculum and the National Standards. It explores the role of the Ministry of Education, the PPTA, and secondary school principals, and asks some fundamental questions about how we define and measure school and teacher quality and the extent to which schools and teachers can be expected to overcome socioeconomic disadvantage in homes. It examines how well ERO makes decisions about school quality, how useful our decile system is, and the extent to which NCEA results provide any useful measure of school quality.

Mr Haque spoke about the key issues in his book in a recent Nine to Noon interview.

Event: March 2015 hui on Re-searching Rangatiratanga, Innovating Mātauranga 

This hui is one in a series of Kei Tua o Te Pae hui aimed at developing a community of critical thinkers who are committed to the reclamation, consolidation and expansion of the mātauranga continuum.

The kaupapa of the 2015 hui is Re-searching Rangatiratanga, Innovating Mātauranga. It is our hope that participants will be inspired by the speakers to re-examine the origin and the meaning of these two concepts and consider their practical expression historically, at present, and in the future. 

The two day event is jointly hosted by Te Wānanga o Raukawa and Te Wāhanga, NZCER. It will take place at the Te Wānaga o Raukawa campus in Ōtaki on 30-31 March 2015. Registration is now open.

Eight projects worth $1.7 million have been selected for funding in the Teaching and Learning Research Initiative (TLRI) 2014 funding round.

You can find out more on the TLRI website or from the media release.

This new paper discusses challenges and issues arising from NZCER's future-focused programme of research. It takes learning itself as an idea worthy of critical scrutiny and addresses some of the tensions that differences in views about learning create for future-focused research. 
This book is a survival guide to help postgraduates at each stage of their studies. The editors gave each contributor a simple task: “If you could go back in time to when you started your postgraduate studies, what would you tell your younger, less experienced self? What advice could you give to prospective or current postgraduate students now, with the wisdom of your hindsight?”

Coming up early in 2015

  • The popular school spelling resource Spell-Write goes online. Look out for more detail in term one.
  • We will be releasing some supplementary PAT:Maths tests. These will provide more options for schools that want to test more than once a year.
  • Due for publication in February: Mathematics and Statistics in the Middle Years: Evidence and Practice, edited by Robin Averill