Let's go to school

We started our day visiting the Ministry of Education. We met with three officials who provided us with an overview of the New Zealand education system.

 

Schooling is compulsory from ages of ages 6 to 16, but most students start on their fifth birthday. So if you turn five on February 3rd, you go to school on February 3rd. You don't wait until the next September as is the case in Manitoba.

One interesting thing that we learned is how each local school has complete autonomy, even to the point that they develop their own curriculum. They do have a very brief curriculum framework but it is up to schools to determine how students will reach these outcomes. Boards of Trustees exist to support single schools. We heard that there were 2600 schools in the country and 2600 different solutions to what makes for an effective learning environment.

Accountability is built in by an Education Review Office which operates independent of the Ministry of Education. This department reviews and publishes reports on the quality of education in all schools in the country. As you may imagine, there are differences in how different groups view this process. It would be the perspective of the Ministry that schools are receptive to the education reviews whereas there are some teacher and community groups that view it as invasive and top-down.

There is tremendous diversity across New Zealand in the types of schools and student performance.
In the internal PISA assessment, the country ranks quite high on quality and low on equity. That essentially references the fact that students in some areas and in some socioeconomic groups do rather well while students in other areas and from different backgrounds have challenges. One particularly challenged group of students are those of aboriginal descent.

During the afternoon, the six of us split into groups of two and visiting three schools in the city. My colleague and I travelled by taxi up the side of a steep, windy, and narrow street to a small elementary school in the heart of a very affluent section of Wellington.  We spent three hours at Northland School meeting with staff and checking out what was happening in classrooms. The principal provided us with an overview of how they were using data to improve student outcomes in literacy and numeracy. It was a wonderful little school with lots of neat things happening and what appeared to be a high level of student engagement. Additional information about Northland School is available at http://www.northland.school.nz/

During the tour of the school, I mentioned how neat it was that every classroom had its own exterior door. The principal mentioned that was a convention of simple necessity. Given that New Zealand is prone to earthquakes, exterior doors allow all students quick access to the safer areas outside of the building. Sensing the mention of earthquakes unnerved me a bit, the principal followed up quickly by reassuring me that they did not have a big tremor in over two months.

Later in the evening, we all got back together to debrief and share what we learned from our different school visits. It was interesting to hear from the others about the similarities and diversity among three schools within the same city.

Tomorrow promises to be an interesting day as well as we visit with the New Zealand Council for Education Research.