Gaven Martin: Massey University Distinguished Professor in Mathematics discusses boost for classroom resources

A significant investment's in store for primary schools - as maths results begin to improve.

The Education Minister's set to announce a boost for classroom resources and teacher support this afternoon.

It comes as 36% of Year 6s met maths expectations in 2025 - up from 30%. 

Massey University Distinguished Mathematics Professor Gaven Martin says that's more than four thousand extra students succeeding.

He says if this success persists, it's tens of thousands doing well, when they were otherwise failing.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
So back here, busy weekend in education, new high school
curriculumses year twelve and thirteen studying at least five subjects
you'll need to pass redegain the qualification. Meantime, an announcement
coming today on primary school maths students meeting or exceeding expectations.
Then our claim has gone from thirty to thirty six percent,
which is encouraging. Gavin Martin is a distinguished professor in
mathematics at Massi University and as with us, Gavin, very

(00:21):
good morning to you.

Speaker 2 (00:23):
Hi, Good morning Mike.

Speaker 1 (00:24):
Do you have a broad observation of what's going on
in education with this government at the moment in terms
of the changes, are they for the better or not?

Speaker 2 (00:32):
Well, you know this pretty strong evidence that they're significantly
better actually not just better, And you know it's been
a philosophical change about the way we teach mathematics as
much as anything else.

Speaker 1 (00:46):
Those claims in terms of the percentages, if you go
back to twenty twenty three, are twenty eight percent gone
to thirty gone to thirty six percent? They claim they
are statistically significant.

Speaker 2 (00:56):
Is that true? Well, yeah, I mean you're moving from
thirty to thirty six percent, right, But those are actual
raw percentages. That's actually a twenty percent increase in performance.
But I think what the numbers are really missing is
the human factor here. Those are data from year six.
They're about seventy thousand year six students, So we're talking

(01:21):
about four thousands, two hundred or so real students who
are succeeding in maths this year and who would otherwise
be expected to fail. And you know that has pretty
significant life consequences. That's just a year six, but this

(01:41):
is rolling out over the whole system, and of this
success persists, there's no reason to suspect it won't. You know,
we're talking many tens of thousands of students who are
succeeding in mathematics when otherwise failing. And that happens year
after year after year, and so soon but unfortunately, not

(02:06):
very soon, we should be starting to see a real change.

Speaker 1 (02:09):
I was going to say, what, what's a good number,
you know, take a few years out, what's a good
number that you want to see passing?

Speaker 2 (02:17):
Yeah, well, you know, I'm a mathematician, so I had
to be a big number. But I think in our
high school system, you know, somewhere between seventy run and
eighty percent is a reasonable target aim for So we're
probably a decade away from those sorts of achievements with
all the wind that are back and everything.

Speaker 1 (02:38):
So but that's but that's real. You think with what
you're seeing going on at the moment.

Speaker 2 (02:42):
We're definitely seeing an improvement. HALFAI. You can push the improvement.
You know, we'll we will get easy wins at the start,
but it's going to get more and more challenging of course.
But you know we're never going to get one hundred
percent because there are always obstructions. That's that level of success.

(03:04):
But you know, if we get to seventy percent, man,
that would just be absolutely fabulous. But we're halfway. So's
the ways to go.

Speaker 1 (03:12):
Good on you a Gavin last to talk to. You
appreciate Gavin Martin, Distinguished Professor of Mathematics at Messa University.
So that's encouraging the announcement coming today. Basically the word
is there is more resource going into that. There's more
where this came from. For more from the My Asking
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