Behind the scenes of the Government’s maths narrative

The latest Trends in International Mathematics and Science report was announced earlier this month, yet it didn’t get the flurry of media attention and political hand-wringing that typically accompanies these announcements. This might be because it presented good news, or you could argue, no news; the results paint a picture similar to the previous report from 2018 with no change in maths achievement. Perhaps no change means no crisis, so no story.

We would say otherwise. A ‘no change’ result means that despite the enormous disruption to education brought by Covid-19 in the five years since the last report, our maths and science results have not been negatively affected (and for Year 5 science results improved). Let’s celebrate this small win! Many teachers and other school staff went beyond the call of duty during the lockdowns and other public health measures and continue to deal with their ongoing consequences.

The Government narrative throughout 2024 was of a crisis in maths education. This so-called crisis has been used to justify accelerated change to maths curriculum, assessment and teaching, often at the expense of adequate consultation and with little input from teachers or maths education researchers. 

There is room for improvement in our maths achievement nationwide – our maths results were lower than those of Australia or England for instance. But given there was ‘no change’ in the maths results, do teachers need the added stress of accelerated change? They are already faced with new literacy teaching requirements, on top of what is widely acknowledged as a complex and challenging job.Maths teaching does need extra support, and we welcome the Government making this a priority, but rushing the job by cutting corners won’t be good for teachers or students.

Challenging teaching environments

Digging deeper into the results shows that there is a growing trend for students to experience disruption in classes – New Zealand had the 4th highest level of ‘disorderly conduct’ among the 58 participating countries. Of Year 5 students, 27 percent reported a disruptive learning environment – such as too much noise to work well or students not following classroom rules – in ‘most’ maths lessons.Teachers are also dealing with an increasingly complex range of pastoral issues.

Children report more bullying than they did in 2018, with one in five (18 percent) experiencing bullying once a week, and another two in five (42 percent) at least monthly. A worrying trend is that cyberbullying among Year 5 students has doubled since 2018 (for example 8 percent of Year 5 students reported having embarrassing images of them shared online at least monthly, up from 4 percent in 2018). Children who experienced the most bullying also had the lowest maths achievement.

The study also highlights challenges in children’s readiness to participate and concentrate on learning; 63 percent of Year 5 students report arriving at school tired every day or almost every day, while 43 percent arrive at school feeling hungry, and 16 percent feeling nervous.

This suggests a couple of things. First, our teachers are managing to maintain achievement despite ever-increasing demands in the learning environment. Second, it’s time to look at how we might mitigate these demands. If teachers were more supported to manage the learning environment, we might finally start to see a real change in our results.

The report results will be no surprise to teachers – they have been crying out for support for a long time. Being resourced to have teacher aides in the classroom would go a long way in reducing the disruptions in the classroom but there is no money for that. The Government does ostensibly recognise the value in supporting teachers, at least in some contexts.

Visiting a new charter school in Christchurch this year, Act leader David Seymour praised it for offering a teaching model of one teacher and three teaching assistants to support every 25 students, which he said led to students at Mastery Schools in Australia learning up to 60 percent faster than those in state and equivalent schools.

Money that has been set aside for charter schools would go a long way towards giving teachers in the public system the support they need and would very likely see improvements in maths achievement.

If we want teachers to be able to teach maths really well, then they need conditions that are conducive to learning. The real crisis the Government should be looking to address is the stark inequality and the profound influence of poverty and hardship. On average, maths achievement for Year 5 students with fewer than 25 books at home was 456, whereas those from homes with more than 100 books scored, on average, 517. (The international benchmark is 500.) The relationship between students’ access to resources at home, and their achievement at school, is startling.

There are tried and tested solutions, but New Zealand schools aren’t adequately resourced to implement them. Instead, teachers are offered quick fixes, silver bullets and directives to change their teaching approaches. When teachers say that their jobs are getting more challenging and complex, we need to take them seriously. The Government’s ‘it’s a crisis’ narrative for maths education draws attention away from some very real crises that manifest in the classroom.

We need policies that support teachers to cope with a changing classroom environment, resourcing more teacher aides, and above all, addressing the real crisis – our disgraceful social inequalities.