Partnerships in Learning

New Zealand Normal Schools Conference 2012

Dugald Scott

Faculty of Education

New Zealand has slipped to the bottom half of the OECD rankings in everything from wealth to life expectancy. Whether to London or Los Angeles, nearly a million New Zealanders have moved abroad in search of better opportunities. If we are to turn around those trends, what is the alternative? In his new book entitled Wool to Weta: Transforming New Zealand's culture and economy, Victoria physicist Professor Paul Callaghan talks to leading New Zealanders involved in science and business to find the answer.

 

•Tackling difficult issues, from the tyranny of distance to our aversion to risk, Professor Callaghan finds a vision for the future built on shifting from Wool to Weta - from relying on agriculture and tourism to investing in a new economy based on science, technology and intellectual property, exemplified by companies such as Weta Workshop, Fisher & Paykel Healthcare and Tait Electronics.

Tackling difficult issues, from the tyranny of distance to our aversion to risk, Professor Callaghan finds a vision for the future built on shifting from Wool to Weta - from relying on agriculture and tourism to investing in a new economy based on science, technology and intellectual property, exemplified by companies such as Weta Workshop, Fisher & Paykel Healthcare and Tait Electronics.[Web advertisement for book launch]

Percentage of 18 year-olds attaining NCEA Level 2 or equivalent

  At school At tertiary Total 18 year olds %age

Māori 6,475 402 13,870 50%

Pasifika 3,958 102 6,813 60%

Asian 4,961 71 6,260 80%

MELAA 805 17 1,244 66%

Other 367 8 632 59%

European/Pākehā 30,055 873 41,972 74%

Total 43,629 1,352 65,804 68%

Source: Ministry of Education

… while on average New Zealand students are among the top performers in the world, the dispersion of achievement scores is particularly large. Among the high-achieving countries, New Zealand had the widest range of scores between the bottom five percent and the top five percent. Performance differences were most pronounced within schools rather than between schools. While some Māori and Pasifika students showed high performance, Māori and Pasifika students were over-represented at the lower end of the performance distribution. New Zealand’s results in international student assessments have been relatively stable over the past decade showing consistently high average performance, coupled with a wide dispersion of achievement scores [emphasis added].

Nusche, D., et al. (2012), OECD Reviews of Evaluation and Assessment in Education: New Zealand 2011, OECD Publishing

Source: PISA 2009 Results: Overcoming Social Background, OECD 2010

Source: PISA 2009 Results: Overcoming Social Background, OECD 2010

… prior achievement is the strongest predictor of the propensity to progress to higher education, at least for students who gained the highest level of school qualification and met the university entrance requirement. When controlling for school decile, the results for students from higher decile schools (9 and 10) showed essentially little or no differences between ethnic groups. Maori and Pasifika students in the study population were just as likely to go on to study at bachelor level after leaving school as their Asian counterparts, and only slightly less than Europeans, at least for students with average and above school achievement …(Strathdee and Engler, 2012)

Many students, many schools, and some countries perform better than expected given their socio-economic backgrounds. Korea, Finland, Canada and Japan, as well as the partner economies Hong Kong-China and Shanghai-China, show high mean performance and a low or, at most, moderate relationship between socio-economic background and student performance (whether measured by the slope or the strength of the socio-economic gradient). These countries combine high average performance with equity and have a large proportion of top-performing students, which demonstrates that excellence and equity can go together.(PISA 2009 Results: Overcoming Social Background,

OECD, 2010)

Source: Ministry of Education website

Source: Ministry of Education website

Questions