Education Forum Document Summary

The New Zealand Curriculum, Kevin Donnelly, February 2007, $22.50 BUY THE PUBLICATION or Download the free PDF

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

This report is written in response to a call for submissions on The New Zealand Curriculum Draft for Consultation 2006. While the main focus is on evaluating the draft curriculum, the following papers and reports have also been examined:

• A Summary of Feedback From The First Meeting of the Curriculum Stocktake Reference Group (Ministry of Education 2001a)
• The Effects of Curricula and Assessment on Pedagogical Approaches and on Educational Outcomes (Ministry of Education 2005)
• Report on the New Zealand National Curriculum, 2002 – Australian Council for Educational Research (Ferguson 2002)
• New Zealand Stocktake: an international critique (Le Métais 2002)
• The New Zealand Curriculum: An ERO Perspective (Education Review Office 2001)
• Curriculum Project Discussion Paper: Key Competencies (New Zealand Curriculum Project Undated)
• Curriculum Stocktake Report to Minister of Education, September 2002 (Ministry of Education 2002).

In October 2002 the Education Forum published a paper written by the author entitled A Review of New Zealand’s School Curriculum: An International Perspective (Donnelly 2002).

The paper placed the New Zealand approach to developing curriculum within an international perspective and concluded that New Zealand had adopted an outcomesbased approach that was outdated. In particular, the paper argued that New Zealand’s curriculum framework and national curriculum statements:

• adopt a flawed and sub-standard outcomes-based approach to curriculum that, while being prevalent during the late 1980s and early 1990s, has since been largely abandoned by equivalent education systems such as those in Australia and the United States;
• fail to recognise properly the strength and superiority of either a ‘syllabus’ or ‘standards’ approach to curriculum development utilised by successful education systems such as Singapore, the Netherlands, the Czech Republic and South Korea;
• uncritically adopt a process-based approach to curriculum that fails to recognise properly the central importance of educational content;
• unduly emphasise a student-centred view of learning to the detriment of what the American academic Jerome Bruner terms the ‘structure of the discipline’; and
• exist in isolation without any substantial attempt, at the time of writing this report, either to validate or strengthen them by undertaking an international comparative analysis similar to that undertaken by the Ministry of Education in Victoria, Australia, when developing its second edition of the Curriculum and Standards Framework (Donnelly 2002, p viii).

In relation to the last point, the Ministry of Education has commissioned two reports (Le Métais 2002 and Ferguson 2002) placing the New Zealand approach to curriculum development in an international perspective. Neither of these, it should be noted, employed the same type of methodology used in the research carried out by the Ministry of Education in Victoria, Australia, when developing the second edition of its Curriculum and Standards Framework. The Victorian approach ranked the achievement objectives taken from various curriculum documents in terms of academic rigour, being unambiguous, detailed and measurable.

In relation to the other four bullet points above, this review concludes that, despite the concerns about the conceptual underpinning and implementation difficulties of New Zealand’s approach to the curriculum raised over the last four years, very little, if anything, has changed. Apart from reducing the number of pages, strands and achievement objectives, and introducing an eighth learning area, Learning Languages, The New Zealand Curriculum Draft for Consultation 2006 adopts the same outcomes-based education model of curriculum development. That the New Zealand authorities have continued to adhere to such a model, in the face of increasing international evidence that it is intellectually flawed and obsolete, is difficult to understand.

Those responsible for the current review of New Zealand’s proposed curriculum appear to be acting on the basis that any evaluation of the curriculum from first principles should be disallowed. This is also cause for concern. Taking for granted what should be open to critique places future generations of New Zealand students at risk.

CLOSE WINDOW