In January 1989, Cathy Wylie developed the idea of an annual national survey over the next three years to see how primary and intermediate schools were faring through the radical changes to the administration of New Zealand's Schools, Tomorrow's Schools.
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The first survey on the impact of the 1989 education reforms showed that they were greeted with both caution and interest. Before the reforms began, parental satisfaction was already high and most parents had some involvement in their child's school.
People in schools were working hard to introduce the reforms, but were often sceptical about their long-term effects. They were more interested in holding on to what they had than in making changes.
In 1973, led by Dr Richard Benton, the newly established NZCER Māori Research Unit (Te Wāhanga Kaupapa Māori), embarked on the first sociolinguistic survey of te reo Māori in New Zealand.
The survey stands as a landmark sociolinguistic work in New Zealand. In all, 6915 individuals in 6,470 Māori families, covering 33,338 individuals throughout the North Island of New Zealand were interviewed in depth.
When we analysed a student dataset that included data from a number of schools, we found that the survey items clustered into four groups which broadly paralleled the five key competencies (see the table below).
Literature that included descriptions of the key competencies
- The New Zealand Curriculum: Draft for consultation 2006 descriptions of the key competencies (Ministry of Education, 2006)
- Papers and articles written about the New Zealand key competencies (Hipkins, 2005; Hipkins, Boyd, and Joyce, 2005; Hipkins, 2006)
- Curriculum Stocktake Report descriptions of the revised essential skills (the precursor to the key competencies) (Ministry of Education, 2002)
This article explores the nature of a continuing mismatch between curriculum reform rhetoric in science education and actual classroom practice.
Lack of philosophical consensus about the nature of science (NOS); lack of appropriate curriculum guidance, classroom materials and pedagogical content knowledge for NOS teaching; teachers' personal theories of learning; and the realities of classroom constraints are all implicated as interacting factors that contribute to the mismatch.
This paper explores the potential for using narrative pedagogy to help students develop a sense of connectedness to the conceptual science they are learning, and through that to develop an ethic of caring, both for the natural environment, and for their own learning.
The full journal article published in:
School Science Review, 86 (315), 53-58.
New Zealand is facing a crisis concerning the recruitment and retention of school principals, as a significant number of “baby-boomer” principals retire over the next five years. Already there are problems recruiting principals, particularly in small rural, low-decile, full primary schools where the principal is a teaching principal.
The main purpose of this research was to find out more about the contributions parent and whānau-led early childhood education (ECE) services are making to children's learning, parent knowledge/skills and social support, and community, in order to provide the Ministry of Education and parent/whānau-led services with information that could be used to support quality in these services. For the purposes of this research parent/whānau led services were playcentres, kōhanga reo, Pasifika early childhood centres and groups, general playgroups, community language playgroups and puna.