Annual Report 2024
The Annual Report outlines our key achievements over the past year and details progress against long term outcomes and objectives.
Introduction from the Secretary for Education
Educational success contributes to personal, collective and national wellbeing outcomes. A key education outcome is for all learners to gain knowledge and competencies that prepare them for work and to participate in society. Yet New Zealand has long-standing challenges to deliver education success for Māori, Pacific, deaf people and those with disabilities, and people from low socio-economic backgrounds. At the same time, we can celebrate exceptionally high achievement amongst some of our young people.
This variation in outcomes is greater for students within a school than between schools, and with in-class factors (such as the quality of teaching) an important contributor to achievement. Some evidence suggests that our system is less effective than other countries at providing the ‘lift’ for those from low socio-economic backgrounds. In addition to resourcing and overall teaching quality, parental and teacher expectations (and how they reinforce one another) of young people is a powerful contributor to progress and achievement.
Responsibility for the delivery of education is devolved and each provider makes their own decisions, within regulatory and resourcing constraints, about how to meet the learning and wellbeing needs of their learners. This places a high reliance on quality leadership throughout the system, and means that it is the teachers, educators and trainers in classrooms, early learning centres, tutorial rooms, halls and workplaces who, along with family and whānau, directly affect education outcomes.
The strengths of a devolved system include local innovation, decision-making that can be flexible and responsive, and the ability to draw on knowledge of local contexts in that decision-making. The downside is that without central support for and accountability in the areas where it really matters, we see high levels of variability of teaching practice and outcomes for learners. We also see inefficiencies in resource use (for example, good teaching practice being built multiple times in multiple classrooms but not adopted more broadly).
The previous government invested in strengthening the national curricula and the incoming government has built on that. Reforming the curriculum – being clear about what learning cannot be left to chance, providing more direction over the sequencing of what needs to be taught, more direction over pedagogy pre-service and in-service, and expectations for assessment – has been part of the policy and implementation agenda throughout the year.
The current curricula requires a significant amount of teacher time to translate concepts into practical teaching action. The changes underway will support teachers to identify individual student learning need and respond to it. The first 100-day plan for the Coalition Government set the ground for its focus on putting progress and achievement first, by removing the distraction of cellphones during the school day and being explicit about the need for the deliberate teaching of maths, reading and writing every day.
Regular attendance at school had been declining since 2015 and COVID-19 exacerbated this. A Select Committee Inquiry informed the development of an Attendance and Engagement Strategy, which we have been implementing since 2022. With the incoming government we have developed an Attendance Action Plan that includes publishing weekly attendance data, evaluating the attendance service and setting clear expectations about the respective roles of parents, caregivers, schools and the Ministry to work together to address the decline in regular attendance.
There will always be considerable resourcing demands across the education system, and we need to invest in the areas with the potential to make the greatest difference to educational outcomes. Investment needs to be focused on fewer initiatives that are proven to be effective, and that are well resourced and implemented. We have started building a more standardised approach to evaluating the impact of initiatives so that we can consistently provide quantitative, as well as qualitative, data to inform government funding decisions. More systematic collection of data is needed to improve our understanding of impact and system performance.
Finally, the pace of societal and technological change (coupled with a very challenging economic environment) presents communities, families, schools and government with multiple demands. These are also the characteristics of a time that responds to innovation and disruption to the usual ways of operating. This is my final Annual Report and I have confidence that we will rise to these challenges. It has been a great privilege and pleasure to hold this role.
Annual report 2024(external link)
Report in relation to Non-Departmental Appropriations 2024(external link)
A limited number of print copies of this report are available.
To enquire about a print copy, email: enquiries@education.govt.nz.
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