Kerre Woodham: Could this be the year education gets back on track? - Kerre Woodham Mornings Podcast

Any day now, counting down the seconds, the kids will be back at school if yours haven't gone already. And this year, maybe, hopefully, fingers crossed, will be the year that our education system gets back on track.

Certainly, Erica Stanford’s bigging up the new focus on structured learning. A press release out from her office says, as schools start back for 2025, there will be a relentless focus on teaching the basics brilliantly so all Kiwi kids grow up the knowledge, skills and competencies needed to grow the New Zealand of the future.

A world leading education system is a key driver to economic growth. Our future playwrights and songwriters need to have a mastery of literacy and numeracy as much as our future mechanical engineers, doctors and electricians, and so on and so forth.

It's kind of a call to arms for teachers and parents from Erica Stanford.

There's also an op-ed piece from a math's and statistics teacher in the Herald this morning, Peter Wills. He says, and he's looking at the failure rates for NCEA Level 1, the news that Kiwi kids did poorly in NCEA comes as no surprise.

 Last month, NCEA results came out and we saw that in 2024 30% of students failed Level 1, slightly u