Speech to Global Education Industry Summit, Helsinki

Thank you for the invitation to participate in this summit and for the opportunity to share New Zealand’s recent investments, progress, and experience with the ongoing development of our education system; in particular with transformative partnerships and technology.

New Zealanders are rightly proud of our education system. It produces well-rounded, curious, creative, problem-solvers, sought after the world-over.

We want that to continue. And we are mindful of two broad challenges – how to ensure that all our children and young people can be educationally successful, and how they can be confident participants in the modern global economy.

Our government has set ambitious targets for educational participation and success.

We want 98 per cent of our new entrants to school to have participated in quality early childhood education and we are currently at 96 per cent.

At the other end of our compulsory schooling system we want at least 85 per cent of our 18 year olds to have as a minimum qualification our National Certificate of Educational Achievement, Level 2. Last year we were at 81 per cent.

While we have seen significant increases in Māori and Pasifika achievement –  up over 20 per cent each under our government to 68 per cent and 75 per cent respectively – we still have much work to do here.

Of particular interest to this summit are three areas of major investment that demonstrate how serious our government is about the importance of educational success for our young people. They are:

• Communities of Learning
• quality teaching and leadership
• integrated education infrastructure.

All three are delivered within a clear context of the importance of parents, the information they have access to about their children, and the choices available to them.

Communities of Learning are new neighbourhood collaborations between early childhood centres and schools, around the whole education pathway of a child from 0-18 years of age.

These are our most transformative partnerships to date.

The Communities use their student data to develop shared achievement challenges which provide the basis for additional expert teaching and leadership resources.

The Communities put each student at the centre with a clear learning pathway from one part of the system to the next, and a continuous personal education story that travels with them.

The Communities of Learning approach has only got underway in New Zealand this year. So far, 42 Communities involving 330 schools and about 120,000 students have voluntarily formed. I expect to announce more next month.

At the heart of the success of this approach will be the quality of teaching and leadership provided by New Zealand’s education profession.

International and national research, and our best evidence synthesis, are consistent that in-school factors of quality teaching and leadership combined with out-of-school involvement of parents and high community expectations create the conditions for learning success.

Our government has:

• invested in exemplary postgraduate courses to raise the quality of teaching
• awarded new scholarships to attract more Māori and Pasifika into the profession
• funded teacher-led innovation to improve and upscale effective practice
• instigated education excellence awards
• Integrated education infrastructure
• legislated an independent professional body to raise the status of the profession
• set out clear expectations for standards based career pathways
• provided a new, aligned, professional learning and development approach
• published public achievement information at local, regional and national levels
• built parent and teacher portals on a managed network

Understanding the importance of well-designed learning environments, our government has also invested in a programme to progressively upgrade the design and layout of school properties, using the most modern education design principles, piloting an integrated facilities management service to free up time and space for pedagogy and leadership, and connecting to a managed network of information and communication technology with ultrafast, high quality data, 24/7.

Our government has deliberately invested in learning spaces that will maximise the benefits of teaching practices, and maximise the investment in IT focused on equipping students with the capabilities and competencies needed in a future that is uncertain.

This summit’s support publication by the OECD Students, Computers and Learning – Making the Connection provides us with very useful insights for our investments in technology.

In New Zealand we are making significant progress in setting the technology platform:

• 97 per cent of eligible schools have fibre or alternative technology, enabling them to take advantage of the N4L Managed Network
• 82 per cent of eligible schools are now connected to the N4L Managed Network, providing fully-funded uncapped data and fast connections
• The Schools Network Upgrade Project is 92 per cent complete 
• We are on track to complete a wireless refresh by December 2016.

In addition, in New Zealand:

• A review of the positioning and content of digital technologies in the New Zealand Curriculum and Te Marautanga o Aotearoa is underway. The review is a priority action in the government’s Science in Society report, A Nation of Curious Minds.
• A Teacher-Led Innovation Fund supporting teachers to develop, test and share new approaches to accelerate achievement has been established.
• A Connected Learning Advisory service providing technical support to help schools integrate digital technologies into teaching, learning and administrative practices has also been set up.
• Our Education Review Office has included digital literacy as a key outcome indicator in new draft school evaluation indicators.
• Teacher professional learning and development (PLD) has been specifically focused on learning with digital technologies, with digital fluency made a national priority for PLD from 2016.
• The NZ Qualifications Authority is making good progress on plans to enable NCEA to be assessed online. Pilots are underway to test approaches to digital assessment and have created a lot of interest from secondary schools.

Committed to these investments that we are, the caution of the OECD report is one that we in New Zealand are alive to: Technology can amplify great teaching but great technology cannot replace poor teaching.

And so it is that our government values sound infrastructure, as a platform, for the transformative partnership between great teachers, involved parents, and engaged students.

Thank you.