Kerre Woodham: Teachers shouldn't be writing the curriculum - Kerre Woodham Mornings Podcast

Didn't Erica Stanford sound impressive talking to Mike on the Mike Hosking breakfast this morning? This is a woman who has clearly been working on her passion portfolio while in opposition, who has come into government ready to go.  

I remember Chris Hipkins when he was in a couple of weeks ago saying we weren't really ready to come into government. What the hell were you doing for the past nine years? Seriously, you're being paid, surely you should be looking at your passion portfolios, you can put up your hand when you're in a party that's been decimated and it's running around looking for a purpose and you can say look, this is why I came into politics, this is what I want to do, and you start work on it. That's what Erica Stanford has done when National was decimated.  

She clearly cares very, very much about education, and about the education of New Zealand children, and about the teaching profession.  And she wasn't out for petty point scoring. The only time she mentioned the last government, she gave them credit for putting secondary teachers on the two-year worked residency visas. But she does want to see New Zealand children be given the right to a world class education that previous generations enjoyed, and I would have to say took for granted. We assumed we could take our place in the world because we were well prepared to do so, and we assumed that would continue. It did not. And that's what happens when you let ideology get in the way of good practice.  

The Education Review Office has found that the new history curriculum that was introduced into schools is being taught on an ad hoc, localised basis, that too many schools and teachers are spending time developing their course studies rather than actually teaching them, and many of them have been overwhelmed by the scale of the changes required.  

ES: The important part here is, it’s really interesting in the history report, schools themselves were saying it’s incredibly time consuming to develop local curriculum. So, we have schools around the country with a very broad, high level curriculum that's done by the centre, they then have to create their own curriculum. So, inconsistent across the country, kids are being taught different things, there’s no consistency of what’s being taught.  

ES: And you said earlier, I was listening to you, about our place in the world and how we started to trade and the first refrigerated ship that went out of, the SS Dunedin, I think, in 1882. That changed the way we traded with the world and changed our economy. We don’t teach that anymore because it’s not specified in the curriculum. 

MH: Why not? 

ES: Because we have shifted in the early 2000’s away from this idea of a centralized curriculum that lays out what kids need to know and when, to a devolved system where schools themselves end up having to create the content and thus saying themselves, “This is too much. We want to get on with the deep, with the magic of teaching, and bringing the content to life.” Because that's what teachers do so well. The, the curriculum is supposed to support them with the details, but since the early 2000’s, we have had this very vague waffly curriculum. Hence our decline amongst, you know, the world. 

Erica Stanford explained it beautifully, and anybody involved in education knows that the changes that have occurred did not happen in the last five years, or even the last 10 years. It's been nearly 30 years of gradual decline.  

But to come back to the point that, you know, teachers should be teaching, that is what they do. That's what they love. That's what they're good at. That's what ignites a passion for curiosity and knowing more among our children. How is it that they are the ones developing the curriculum within their schools when the number of full-time equivalents employed at the Ministry of Education ballooned by 55%?  

The ministry employed 4,311 staff, 1,704 more than it did in June 2016. That was last year. So, 4,311 staff, 1,704 more than it did in June of 2016, and they used the explanation to say that the ministry had ballooned by 55%, as since 2017 it's taken on 550 extra education advisers and an additional 170 curriculum advisors and related staff. So that's a huge increase.  

Nearly 1000 people involved in in writing the curriculum in advising on the curriculum. But wait, there's more. They also rely extensively on consultants for policy development. They tend to contract out for all the major curriculum development services, about 10 small education consultancy firms relied largely, if not entirely, on Ministry of Education c