John Raine: Where to With Education and Research Policy

Cultural Re-Engineering through the Education System

The 2020s have been a period of cultural change in academia throughout the Western world. In countries such as the USA, Canada, the U.K. and Australia, where universities have been heavily captured by woke agendas, we have yet to see a marked loss of momentum in “progressive” left wing politics on campus. This embrace of postmodernism and identity politics has also pervaded the primary and secondary education system. It has also infected to some degree the country’s research system.

David Lillis: Education, Science and the Election

“I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time - when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness...” Carl Sagan (1995).

Perspective with Heather du Plessis-Allan: Erica Stanford doesn't need to apologise for raising standards

All right, we need to talk about a news story that has been written in such a way that you're supposed to be alarmed by the fact that nearly half of all Year 12 students might fail Erica Stanford's NCEA replacement.

Ryan Bridge: We need more ambitious leaders in education

Story of the week this week goes to a Herald piece about Ngaire Ashmore, the principal of Auckland Girls' Grammar.

Ten years ago, she took over and turned the place upside down.

Where there was failure, there's now a 92% university entrance mark for Year 13s. It was less than 50% when she started.

John Raine: The Indoctrination Must Stop But Labour Would Double Down

The Ongoing Long March Through the Institutions

More than three years ago, along with many others, I was drawing attention to New Zealand’s trajectory towards cultural authoritarianism, and the widespread identity politics and critical social justice activism in our public service, the universities, the wider education system, but also in the private sector. I thought back then that we might quickly pass peak woke and that rationality would have taken hold again by now. Not so fast, some warned - they were right!

Perspective with Heather du Plessis-Allan: National's winning on education - and parents agree

So I reckon there was one moment in that leaders' debate that would have worried parents up and down this country, and it was this one.

Chris Hipkins conceded that, if Labour were to win the election, he would scrap the one hour of reading, writing and maths for primary school kids.

David Lillis: Shakespeare in our Curriculum

The New Curriculum

The ongoing work on education under Erica Stanford has come in for a great deal of criticism over the last few months especially. The new curriculum has received particular censure, and the compulsory inclusion of Shakespeare in the English curriculum seems to have presented issues for some parties (Lillis, 2025). Indeed, New Zealand needs a balanced curriculum that reflects the multicultural nature of our society and therefore of our primary and secondary students, and surely a Eurocentric curriculum for New Zealand would be ill-posed and therefore completely unacceptable.

Caleb Anderson: The Education Conundrum - Complementary Opposites

Media have been delighted to run a story on the opinions of five anonymous teachers bemoaning current curriculum changes. The anonymity implies that these teachers would be reprimanded for the positions taken, unlikely, and their unanimity indicates the views of the profession at large, also unlikely.

John Raine: Don’t Back Down on the Education Reforms, Erica Stanford

The Post Primary Teachers’ Association (PPTA) has circled its wagons and is mounting a noisy counterattack on Education Minister Erica Stanford’s much-needed Education Reforms [1].   Last year it was loud objection (still ongoing) to the new literacy and numeracy curricula, solid science learning, and a lessening in the focus on the Treaty of Waitangi required of School boards. Now it is the pushback on the new NZCE Year 12-13 schools’ qualification which will have compulsory exams in every subject.

Ryan Bridge: Old school is the best school

In education, old school is the best kind of school.

Secondary students will be forced to learn science, as well as maths and English, in the fifth form.

They'll be graded, not on merit or achieved or whatever, but A+ to E.

Caleb Anderson: The Denial of Complexity in the Search for Simplicity

I initially trained to be a history teacher, but have spent most of my career in school administration. I have sometimes thought that, in retirement, I would give my time to the nearest secondary school, at no charge, for the simple privilege of working with their senior history students, inculcating a love for the discipline, and maybe to encourage some students to further their studies of history at the tertiary level.

Ryan Bridge: The path to improving financial literacy

I see ACT is flying a kite on free money for school kids.

Which sounds odd given the party's aversion to free lunches.

Seymour's talking about giving each Year 11 student, 5th form, $500 each to invest. It'd cost $30 million a year and could be funded via the KiwiSaver subsidy.

Perspective with Heather du Plessis-Allan: The pressure's on for the primary teachers' union

I think we can quite accurately use the word 'brilliant' to describe the latest move from the Government’s man in the primary teachers’ pay negotiations.

Brian Roche, the Public Service Commissioner, has gone around the union and offered a 4.7 percent pay increase to primary teachers who are not in the union. If they agree to it, the first chunk of the pay rise will kick in 19 days from now and the next chunk will take effect in January next year.

Judy Gill: When the Language of Governance Reaches The School Gate

How the -tanga register moved from the bureaucracy into everyday New Zealand life

Alternative headlines: From the Policy Desk to the School Gate; How a new public vocabulary entered everyday New Zealand life; The Words that Arrived Without a Lesson

Judy Gill: The Bar was Lowered — and a Third of Boys Still Failed

How ERO reporting allows primary schools to escape academic scrutiny and why low parent expectations mean it goes largely unchallenged

When an Education Review Office (ERO) report describes students as “not yet achieving,” “priority learners,” or “requiring acceleration,” it is avoiding a simpler truth: some children are failing to meet basic academic expectations.

Ryan Bridge: We've taken parenting to a level beyond useful

I'm part of the generation that grew up pre-cell phones.

Gifts were usually clothing you needed. Toys were chatter rings, marbles, maybe a skate board.

There was no 'picky eating', as we've heard about this week. If you didn't finish what was on your plate at dinner, you didn't get a treat afterwards.

Steven Gaskell: Back to Basics: When Education Finally Means Education Again

For the first time in a long time, it feels like the Government has finally stood up, cleared its throat, and reminded everyone that the purpose of a school is to teach children not drag them through constitutional re-education camps or daily ideological rituals masquerading as “civics.” The long-running experiment of forcing every school board in New Zealand to “give effect to the Treaty” a phrase so elastic it might as well have been drafted on a bungee cord has finally reached the end of its political shelf life. And thank goodness. Expecting part time volunteers juggling budgets, property maintenance, staffing pressures, and attendance crises to also act as legal historians and cultural negotiators was absurd from the start. A school board is not the Waitangi Tribunal, and classrooms are not political marae.

Caleb Anderson: Public Policy and the Most Unholy of Trinities

I did most of my postgraduate study through what you might call conservative institutions of learning in the United States. I still have connections with these institutions.

I received this survey from Hillsdale College this week, and felt it was highly relevant in light of recent evidence of persistent radicalization of our education system.

Our Education Minister's recent comments in defence of the wording of the Education Training and Amendment Bill give additional cause for concern.

David Lillis - Managerialism: A Failed Experiment?

Variable Management across the Board

Hearing of continual problems in New Zealand’s workplaces has prompted this article as a comment on management and leadership. Perhaps the environments where I have worked were not typical of New Zealand’s workplaces, but unfortunately my own observations of management in the Public Service and at one Non-Government Organisation have been extremely disappointing, and I hear numerous accounts of poor decision-making, dysfunctional workplaces and bullying across the country. My belief, or rather my hope, is that most workplaces in New Zealand function reasonably well and that, in general, leadership and management in both the public and private sectors are tolerably good. On that basis, accepting that in most workplaces leadership and management are of a reasonable standard, in this article I focus on those situations where I feel that matters are in need of improvement. 

Perspective with Heather du Plessis-Allan: Why is it so hard to do the obvious thing?

I've been thinking overnight about the news yesterday that a second Christchurch school has decided to put the walls back up in their classrooms and abandon those modern learning barn style spaces that we were doing in favour of going back to the traditional single class. 

The school is Shirley Boys High.