This is a comprehensive picture of the current experiences and challenges for secondary schools in New Zealand. It presents the findings from NZCER's national survey of secondary schools, conducted in July and August 2015.  It includes the perspectives of principals, teachers, parents and board of trustee members on a wide range of issues.

You can either download the full report or by thematic chapter.

This report comes from an exploratory project looking at professional learning and development for primary science teachers.

In recent years there has been increased interest in science in New Zealand for social and economic reasons. However, there has been concern that the primary school system is not preparing students as well as it could in science. Recent research suggests that many primary teachers do not feel confident about either teaching ...

Internationally, associations between mathematics achievement and students’ beliefs and attitudes related to learning are well established. This article examines five studies to identify patterns in New Zealand students’ mathematics-related beliefs and attitudes, and their relationships with achievement. The studies involved students aged 5-13 years and looked at different aspects of students’ beliefs and attitudes, from ideas about the malleability of intelligence, to confidence in their general mathematics ability, to task-specific ...

This report presents findings from a case study at Pakuranga Intermediate on their collaboration with a group of performing and visual artists in 2012-2014. It's part of a wider NZCER investigation into successful and sustained collaborations between schools, communities and professional experts.

We were interested in exploring the extent to which the new kinds of partnerships and relationships at Pakuranga Intermediate embodied future-oriented teaching and learning approaches. The report discusses ...

The term Education 3.0 is used to signal the shift from traditional schooling to models more appropriate for the 21st century. This work was carried out for Te Aho o Te Kura Pounamu - the Correspondence School - to scope possible new metrics they could use to document student learning and teacher practice to support that learning.

The full report is available here.

Intensive Wraparound Service (IWS) is designed for children and young people with complex mental health, behavioural and special education needs.  This evaluation was designed to contribute to the future development of the service.

The full report can be downloaded here.

A media release about the report from Education Minister Hekia Parata is available here.

Secondary schools aim to develop young people to be “confident, connected, actively involved lifelong learners” (New Zealand Curriculum, 2007). This future-focused vision for young learners guides the everyday work of teachers in classrooms, workshops, and laboratories around New Zealand. Science teachers, specifically, are charged with helping “students explore how both the natural physical world and science itself work so that they can participate as critical, informed, and responsible citizens in ...

This journal article looks at how a group of 7-9 year olds in four New Zealand primary schools thought about intelligence, their beliefs about themselves as maths learners and how that related to their achievement in maths. It also identified strategies that teachers could use to build students' self-efficacy.

The article can be accessed from Science Direct.

WAPA is a network of West Auckland schools which have worked together since 2009.  NZCER has worked alongside them to look at WAPA's progress and what supports it. The paper contains insights for the new Communities of Learning networks.

Springboard Trust is a non-profit organisation whose aim is to improve student outcomes through improving the effectiveness of principals. NZCER was asked to evaluate the short-term impact of its flagship programme, the Strategic Leadership for Principals Programme (SLPP).

In 2015 Springboard Trust and NEXT foundation commissioned the New Zealand Council of Education Research (NZCER) to evaluate the short-medium term impacts of the Strategic Leadership for Principals programme (SLPP) on school leadership and schools. Focusing on Alumni principals from 2012 - 2014, the evaluation found the programme is of a high calibre, is well-constructed ...