{"id":143611,"date":"2025-11-19T21:26:13","date_gmt":"2025-11-19T21:26:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/143611\/"},"modified":"2025-11-19T21:26:13","modified_gmt":"2025-11-19T21:26:13","slug":"the-warning-signs-for-new-zealand-in-englands-back-to-basics-school-reforms","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/143611\/","title":{"rendered":"The warning signs for New Zealand in England\u2019s \u2018back to basics\u2019 school reforms"},"content":{"rendered":"

A newly released review of England\u2019s decade-old curriculum shake-up, which inspired Erica Stanford here, finds many positives \u2013 but it also serves as a cautionary tale on the dangers of rigidity, writes Max Rashbrooke.<\/p>\n

New Zealand education minister Erica Stanford\u2019s controversial curriculum reforms<\/a> are not without precedent. Around a decade ago, a right-wing English education secretary, Michael Gove, instituted a sweeping set of changes designed to make instruction \u2013 in a phrase now deeply familiar to Kiwi teachers \u2013 \u201cknowledge-rich\u201d.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Stanford and Gove have, unsurprisingly, met and shared notes, and the former has been explicit<\/a> about the inspiration she takes from England\u2019s experience. So it should concern us that a landmark review of the latter\u2019s reforms has just found that, alongside some notable successes, they created exactly the kinds of problems that Kiwi teachers worry will crop up here.<\/p>\n

Like Stanford, Gove was driven by a core belief that teaching had become too focused on developing broader competencies and thought processes, and insufficiently attentive to imparting core facts and knowledge. He sought to set out a clearer list of exactly what children \u201cshould\u201d learn, privileging a \u201ccore\u201d curriculum while invoking ideas of rigour and structure.<\/p>\n

None of these ideas is inherently unhelpful. But Gove was \u2013 and is \u2013 a famously complex person; despite being known as \u201cMike the polite\u201d for his old-school courtesy, he was also capable of the most vicious backstabbing imaginable. And that duality can be seen in his curriculum reforms.<\/p>\n

\"AEducation secretary Michael Gove announcing the review of the national schools curriculum in London in 2011 (Photo: Stefan Rousseau\/PA Images via Getty Images)<\/p>\n

Last week\u2019s review<\/a>, commissioned by the current Labour government and staffed by experts, feels comprehensive, nuanced and thoughtful, a world away from the political hatchet jobs that often result from such exercises. So it is important that the review finds Gove\u2019s reforms \u201chave had a positive impact on attainment\u201d. English 15-year-olds perform above the developed-country average in reading, maths and science, while 16-19-year-olds do \u201csubstantially better\u201d than average in literacy and problem-solving, having made \u201csignificant improvements\u201d since 2012.<\/p>\n

Given New Zealand\u2019s well-publicised slide down the developed-country rankings, these results will be music to Stanford\u2019s ears. The rest of the review, however, bears many cautionary tales.<\/p>\n

The first is that the gap in achievement between poorer and richer pupils \u201cremains stubbornly wide\u201d, and those with special educational needs struggle. Some gaps \u201care widening rather than narrowing\u201d. This is less a criticism of curriculum reforms, of course, than a reminder of their limitations.<\/p>\n

As educationalists constantly point out, but the public struggles to comprehend, most of what affects students\u2019 marks happens outside the school gates. Socioeconomic factors \u2013 poverty prominent among them \u2013 account for 60-80% of the variance in children\u2019s test scores. The failure of Stanford\u2019s government to tackle poverty will always be a roadblock to her potential success.<\/p>\n

\"APrime minister Christopher Luxon and education minister Erica Stanford (Photo: Hagen Hopkins\/Getty Images)<\/p>\n

Gove\u2019s reforms, by emphasising a \u201ccore\u201d curriculum, have also narrowed the learning experience. That \u201ccore\u201d, extending as it did to languages, history and geography, was thankfully less narrow than our own government\u2019s borderline obsessional focus on English and maths. Nonetheless the review finds that England\u2019s curriculum measures have \u201cunnecessarily constrained students\u2019 choices\u201d.<\/p>\n

Predictably, the arts and other enrichment activities have been badly hit. Theatre-related content has been \u201csignificantly reduced\u201d, the review concludes, and student numbers are sharply declining. The same story broadly holds in music and dance. And these subjects are not nice-to-haves: the arts are fundamental to the human experience, a crucial source of beauty and understanding, and cannot be sidelined without great damage.<\/p>\n

Nor is that the end of the problems identified by the review. It highlights an obsession with tests and exams, which in England are administered at twice or even three times the volume of other high-performing countries such as Ireland and Canada.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Critics have also stressed the rigidity of Gove\u2019s reforms, their unyielding belief that people holding power can dictate a minutely detailed list of facts that pupils \u201cmust\u201d acquire. The review finds \u201ca disproportionate focus on rote learning to pass exams\u201d, impeding students\u2019 efforts to comprehensively understand their subjects and acquire the skills needed to grapple with the real world.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Most history teachers want the level of prescribed content \u201creduced significantly\u201d. In maths, meanwhile, too many terms are rapidly introduced and then rigidly drilled, again at the expense of a deep engagement \u201cwith foundational mathematical concepts\u201d and \u201cnon-routine problem-solving\u201d. This leads to \u201conly a superficial understanding of the fundamentals\u201d and limited ability to apply knowledge to real problems.<\/p>\n

It is a similar story in English, where the curriculum reflects Gove\u2019s obsession with teaching grammatical terms like \u201cfronted adverbials\u201d, resulting in instruction that is overly theoretical, unengaging to pupils, \u201cand, crucially, does not help them to write well\u201d. In art, meanwhile, works by ethnic minority artists are seldom used. Young people, presumably including many from non-white backgrounds, told the review panel that not seeing people like themselves in curriculum materials was demotivating \u2013 a point that the review panel noted was supported by wider evidence.<\/p>\n

Given the above rigidity, it is not surprising that the review echoes concerns \u2013 often expressed by England\u2019s teaching profession \u2013 that an overly prescriptive curriculum can sap motivation or simply prove unworkable. The review notes that the curriculum must ensure \u201cthe professional autonomy of teachers\u201d, adding that those teachers should be able \u201cto bring the curriculum to life \u2026 to reflect their students\u2019 lives and experiences\u201d.<\/p>\n

In all this, the resemblance to Stanford\u2019s proposed reforms is unmistakable. Although there has been substantial goodwill among New Zealand educators to fix some of NCEA\u2019s shortcomings, there is now also a substantial backlash against a new curriculum that, like Gove\u2019s, can seem at times old-fashioned, overly narrow, and too focused on western \u201cclassics\u201d at the expense of everything else. The review does not argue that Gove\u2019s reforms have been an outright disaster, as some claim. Many aspects, it says, \u201care working well\u201d. But it also lays bare the all-too-real dangers of a rigid curriculum.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A newly released review of England\u2019s decade-old curriculum shake-up, which inspired Erica Stanford here, finds many positives \u2013…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":143612,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[492,84,67630,156,69392,111,96925,139,69,135],"class_list":{"0":"post-143611","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-comments-enabled","9":"tag-education","10":"tag-education-reform","11":"tag-entertainment","12":"tag-erica-stanford","13":"tag-new-zealand","14":"tag-new-zealand-curriculum","15":"tag-newzealand","16":"tag-nz","17":"tag-politics"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/143611","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=143611"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/143611\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/143612"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=143611"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=143611"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=143611"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}