Can we have the best school system in the world?

Educational achievement among our young people is critical to New Zealand’s future, not only for those young people but for the generations to come. Research shows that the single best predictor of a person’s educational success is the level of educational achievement of his or her mother. Failure to address the intergenerational cycle of under-achievement that exists in parts of our country therefore comes at a cost to us all: the extraordinary waste of talent among our young people with major impacts for employers and for our society as a whole.

For students from advantaged communities, our school system is as good as anywhere in the world. Many students go on to leading universities in New Zealand and around the world. However, many others who ought to succeed do not. For example, every year about 3,800 fewer students from low decile schools achieve University Entrance than would be the case if they had the same rates of success as students from more affluent communities. These students are disproportionately Māori and Pasifika, but the issue is not simply one of ethnicity: Māori and Pasifika students in high decile schools are just as likely as their fellow students to progress to university study. Rather, the problem is due to a complex mix of socio-economic factors that often begin early in life and, as recent evidence suggests, are best tackled by high quality teaching and strong educational leadership.

Educational researchers at the University of Auckland have been exploring ways in which to raise academic results in schools in lower socio-economic areas.

The team at the University’s Woolf Fisher Research Centre is developing research-based interventions which have shifted the educational achievement of students in low decile primary and intermediate schools from well below the national average to above the national average.

For example:

• The Learning Schools Model has been run over 15 years, to raise and extend student achievement, working in approximately 400 schools and in five countries
• The Manaiakalani schools research evaluation partnership, in the past three years has helped over 15,500 students on average experience a substantial acceleration in learning, especially writing
• The Summer Learning Journey blogging programme, Centre researchers proved that blogging twice a week can completely eliminate the ‘summer slump’ – a dramatic drop in reading and writing which occurs over the long summer holiday break.
  

The latest focus is to ensure that learners from diverse communities and in low decile schools have access to complex and cognitively challenging curriculum resources and evidence-based instructional design so that teachers are equipped to build 21st century skills in their students which include critical thinking and reasoning skills.

This type of research could bring huge improvements in educational achievement to the advantage of all young New Zealanders.

The challenge for us now is to ensure that the outcomes from this research can be delivered uniformly across the school sector for maximum impact.

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