Every parent wants to see their child thrive at school — to feel confident, supported, and capable. Today, the Government is taking a major step toward making that aspiration a reality with the launch of a new Parent Portal: an online resource designed to enable families to play their part in their child’s learning.
“This is about giving parents clarity, confidence, and practical tools to support their child’s learning journey,” says Erica Stanford.
Launching today, the Parent Portal will provide a clear, easy-to-understand year by year guide to what children will be learning in English and maths under New Zealand’s refreshed, knowledge-rich curriculum.
This is a great, much needed, initiative. By chance I have been meeting with a variety of parents of school aged kids, discussing changes to the education system which would help empower parents – who are meant to be active partners – in the schooling system.
One of the issues we identified was that so many parents have no idea what their child should be able to do each year. And two ten minute meetings a year isn’t sufficient.
The idea we had is that every term a parent should get from their school a short plain English summary of what subject areas will be taught in the next term, and what they will be covering in class.
The Government’s parent portal goes 90% of the way towards this goal. It provides simple summaries of the curriculum by subject, and year. So for example I can look up the Year 4 Maths curriculum and get:
- work with larger numbers and use estimation by comparing numbers up to 10,000 and adding and subtracting 2 and 3-digit numbers. They’re also using rounding and words like ‘about’, ‘more or less’, and ‘close to’ to estimate and check their answers
- multiply and divide building on their Year 3 multiplication facts (2-, 3-, 5-, and 10-times tables). Your child is learning the 4- and 6-times tables. They practise multiplication and division, like 23 x 5 or 44 ÷ 4, using methods such as the ‘family of facts’ (for example, 4 x 5 = 20, 20 ÷ 4 = 5)
- begin learning about decimals and develop fraction ideas by connecting ideas about fractions to decimal numbers (for example, 3/10 is the same as 0.3) and adding numbers with 1 decimal place (for example, 1.3 + 0.2 = 1.5). They’re also learning to add simple fractions and find fractions of whole amounts (for example, “if you eat 1/5 of 40 strawberries, how many did you eat?”)
- work with money by making amounts of money using dollars and cents, calculating amounts with dollars and cents, and working out change using whole-dollar amounts.
I hope the portal is widely promoted to parents.
It is so nice to have a government that wants to empower parents in the education system. This has not always been the case.
David Farrar runs Curia Market Research, a specialist opinion polling and research agency, and the popular Kiwiblog where this article was sourced. He previously worked in the Parliament for eight years, serving two National Party Prime Ministers and three Opposition Leaders.
7 comments:
A great virtue of phonics was that, assuming actually literate, the most simple minded of parents could assist. In recent years children have experienced the dual disadvantage that phonics not utilised and parents also no longer familiar with. Same applied to some extent to times tables. And how many parents grasp Venn diagrams? (Anyone ever consciously used one?) And for all subjects parents could fathom the level from the text and questions in textbooks. Modern books are of a different style and far less fathomable. And unless failing to their level is resumed as of old, is it appropriate to specify the level pupils should be achieving in their class when likely beyond their ability? Going to be many artfully worded obscure reports, one of the things the revision was intended to reduce.
I read the curriculum for parents and referred to in this article. My experience is that many parents are frightened of maths and beyond about year 4 , they will likely be unable or confident enough to tackle the topics . While some of the practical ideas are very good , I do believe the over emphasis on practical applications mostly are over done and too time consuming . This is probably the result of cherry picking out of Singapore Maths this feature. However if you go on the internet you will see Singapiore Maths has very many traditional aspects like rote learning tables, , one method only for doing algorithms ( methods of doing arithmetic manipulations like two figure multiplying) and plenty of practice exercises not all in a practical setting.
In contrast I would suggest homework work books as were used in about 1980s , and published by Addison press. These books were on the book list for parents to buy , They were composed of news print and cheap. Many studies are now revealing pencil and paper and text books are superior to computerized learning. Real life applications in teaching maths . instruction is a progressive obsession supposedly to aid understanding . With our poor literacy standards they just add further complexity. Singapore maths provides for free, online numerous downloadable worksheets of exercises with little wordiness as we had traditionally . I don't think the NZ curriculum is keeping up with cognitive science findings on repetition , reinforcement and consolidation required in learning skills in maths.
How easy it was for our once excellent education system to be wrecked by ideology . How difficult it is to build it up again especially with academics and others still promoting progressive ideas and a hatred of anything traditional which actually had effective methods .
'Plain English' is something my son's high school really struggles with! It's anything but when it comes to communicating progress and what he's working on. And when I've contacted them and politely pointed out they need to work on how they communicate I get the distinct impression it's either obfuscation on purpose or they really just live in their own world where the English language has morphed into something else
Fine , However just like parent teacher meetings, the parents that should go , need to go for shildren struggling , dont go and the child suffers . Nothing changes .
It is deliberate as they do not dare hint of the student's rank in ability. And after years at modern universuty, obscure writing becomes instinctive.
It is deliberate to be vague about a child's achievement because if a teacher states the truth about a student's poor achievement the parent can then demand something be done by the teacher to improve it. The average classroom teacher has no clue how to do this. If you are a close buddy of the teacher she/he may tell you verbally and in strict confidence that your child is falling behind and needs extra outside help .
I know of principals who have told a teacher to rewrite a student's report because it mentioned underachievement and that didn't reflect well on the school !
>"Every parent wants to see their child thrive at school"
A very flawed premise. Between many and most parents of the most difficult kids couldn't care a hoot. Many are antagonistic towards school as it represents authority. When asked to come in because of the kids' poor behaviour they turn on the school and claim it's all the school's fault.
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