Why the story about Kiwi kids being bad at maths isn’t quite adding up

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1. 0:06Speaker 1: Kia ora, I'm Chelsea Daniels and this is The Front Page, a daily podcast presented by the New Zealand Herald. It
2. 0:16Speaker 1: feels like we're constantly being told that our kids are just really bad at math. In 2023, we were informed that kids recorded their worst ever results in something called
3. 0:27Speaker 1: the OECD Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA, exams.
4. 0:33Speaker 1: It was called disastrous, disappointing, but we had heard it all before. In 2020, the 13-year-olds recorded their worst ever
5. 0:42Speaker 1: results in the Trends and International Mathematics and Science Study, or TIMSS. In 2023, almost 60% of year eights were failing maths, according to something called the National Monitoring Study
6. 0:54Speaker 1: of Student Achievement, or NMSSA. And in 2024, data from the Curriculum Insights and Progress Study, or SIPS, showed that
7. 1:04Speaker 1: just 22% of Year 8s were at the expected curriculum benchmark for maths. PISA, TIMSS, NMSSA, SIPS, what are all
8. 1:14Speaker 1: of these? Are Kiwi kids really that bad at maths?
9. 1:18Speaker 1: Or is this just a case of cherry-picking from random data sets to suit a certain narrative? Today on the front page, University of Auckland maths expert Dr Lisa Darrah
10. 1:30Speaker 1: is with us to try and explain some of these numbers.
11. 1:37Speaker 1: First off, Lisa, there seems to be a lot of international tests and metrics that measure our kids' success in
12. 1:44Speaker 1: things like maths, science, writing, etc. You've got PISA, TIMSS, NMSSA, SIPSS.
13. 1:51Speaker 1: Should we just pick one or do all of those individual kind of metrics give us something like different things to offer?
14. 1:58Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, they are slightly different. So the international tests that pertain to maths are the PISA and TIMSS.
15. 2:06Speaker 2: And PISA tests 15-year-olds, whereas the TIMSS tests kind of year five and year eight. So they're at the primary
16. 2:15Speaker 2: and intermediate levels. So they're testing different students. And when you say NMSSA and SIPS, the SIPS is the Curriculum
17. 2:24Speaker 2: Insights and Progress Study. And NMSSA is what the Curriculum Insights and Progress Study used to be. So, I mean, they're effectively the same study. Originally, it was NEMP and
18. 2:35Speaker 2: then NMSSA and now SIPS. So they're all run out of Otago University. And they're a national, not an international test.
19. 2:44Speaker 2: So it's a national monitoring of our achievements. And so that one compares how New Zealand kids do to how New Zealand kids did in the past. And that one
20. 2:55Speaker 2: I actually would say is extremely useful. It's a really good assessment because it's not high stakes for the students.
21. 3:04Speaker 2: A decent sample of students are taken and it just provides a really good measure of how we're doing educationally.
22. 3:11Speaker 2: As for the international test, do we need them? I mean, there's arguments against the international testing because they do tend to create what has been globally called the PISA shock.
23. 3:23Speaker 2: So basically the results come out and then they're used by political parties to either generate a big crisis narrative or else generate this big, oh, we're doing amazing kind
24. 3:33Speaker 2: of story. And I mean, with statistics, you can just cherry pick the results and use... use what you want to create the story. Or you can kind of get
25. 3:44Speaker 2: caught up in the competition and say, oh, why aren't we doing as well as these other nations? And you're not often comparing apples with apples. Other cultures have other priorities.
26. 3:54Speaker 2: And often here in New Zealand, we punch above our weight when we go to the Olympics or Commonwealth Games because we tend to prioritize sporting in our culture. And
27. 4:04Speaker 2: I don't think we would really want to change that.
28. 4:07Speaker 2: We're proud of our sporting achievements. So, you kind of need to look at the big picture and think, well, do we want to really engage in that competition? Maybe.
29. 4:16Speaker 2: There's an argument for and against it.
30. 4:18Speaker 1: Yeah, so this week, the Education Minister praised our kids' latest performance in the PISA exams for 2025, saying the
31. 4:25Speaker 1: results indicate achievement is stabilising after years of decline. New Zealand students remain above the OECD average across all three subjects.
32. 4:34Speaker 1: That's your reading, science and maths. Is that good?
33. 4:39Speaker 2: Well, I mean, I found these results really interesting because in maths in particular, which is my area, we've got the exact same score. Like there's one point different, which
34. 4:51Speaker 2: is nothing. And three years ago, this is a good example of the politicking. Three years ago, this was used to generate this crisis narrative. Wow, we need to change everything.
35. 5:03Speaker 2: And then this year, it's been used to say, wow, everything's improving. And actually, neither of those stories are true.
36. 5:09Speaker 2: It wasn't a crisis. We, you know, we're doing better than the OECD. We're, you know, we tend to be tracking well. We can talk about this decline in a moment,
37. 5:21Speaker 2: but we We don't actually see a crisis with these results.
38. 5:25Speaker 2: But at the same time, we can't really claim that these results are showing that the reforms that have been taking place are working because the reforms that have taken
39. 5:36Speaker 2: place so far have been at the primary and intermediate school level. And the students who sat this test are 15-year-olds.
40. 5:44Speaker 2: And none of the reforms have impacted on them yet.
41. 5:48Speaker 2: I mean, the only reform that we can say might have impacted on them is the no cell phones in school.
42. 5:55Speaker 2: And we are above the OECD average on not having cell phones in classes. So we could celebrate that perhaps.
43. 6:02Speaker 2: But we can't really say that the reforms have led to any improvement. And Reform in education takes a long,
44. 6:11Speaker 2: long time, so you wouldn't even expect to see any change had there been reform at the secondary school level yet. So, yeah,
45. 6:21Speaker 2: so it's interesting. What I take from the PISA results is an enormous gap between the high achievers and the low achievers. We've got this huge range, and we've always– well,
46. 6:33Speaker 2: for a long time, we've had this huge range– And so it's certainly giving us information about our system that we need to do something about this huge range. We're
47. 6:41Speaker 2: underserving those students in our classes that are not achieving well.
48. 6:47Speaker 2: And it's often within the same school we've got this big range. So we need to do something about those underachievers in our school system.
49. 6:54Speaker 1: And when we see declining results, I suppose, I looked at this table, I think it went back right to 2002, for instance.
50. 7:00Speaker 2: Is it.
51. 7:05Speaker 1: Silly to compare 2026 or 2025 to something like 2002 because the world has changed quite a bit in those 23 years.
52. 7:15Speaker 2: Yeah, so looking at the declining results are interesting. There was a big drop between the last– between the sort
53. 7:24Speaker 2: of 2022 and– before and after COVID, basically. So in 2022, we saw this big drop. But we saw it all around the world, and it's easily explained by the fact
54. 7:35Speaker 2: that there were a whole lot of students just not in school. So, I mean, it was completely expected. And New Zealand dropped just in line with the rest of the OECD. So there was– it was kind of no
55. 7:44Speaker 2: news there, nothing to– I mean– nothing to really be concerned about. There wasn't anything happening in our country that was oddly different. But there was another drop that happened
56. 7:55Speaker 2: between 2009 and 2012. And this drop, New Zealand dropped and the rest of the world didn't. So it is
57. 8:05Speaker 2: an opportunity to take a look at our system and think, well, what changed for us then? What was going on? And we don't actually have the answer for this. And as you say, there's a lot going on in the world
58. 8:16Speaker 2: and there's a lot of different things that impact on achievement.
59. 8:20Speaker 2: But we did see that drop across the board. So it's certainly something to consider. Were there changes in our educational system that may be played out in these PISA results?
60. 8:37Speaker 3: Maths is on the mend around New Zealand. Not only are parents reporting to me how well their kids are doing in mathematics and how much more confident they are,
61. 8:46Speaker 3: but in year six, the results jumped 6% in our curriculum and site study, which is huge. Maths achievement in New Zealand has been in decline for decades, but we
62. 8:56Speaker 3: are turning all of that around. Students are more confident in the classroom, teachers are more well-resourced, and parents, you can see that it's working. We are committed to these
63. 9:07Speaker 3: reforms and we are committed to teaching the basics brilliantly.
64. 9:11Speaker 1: I see that schools are now facing their third primary maths curriculum change in under three years. So you've got the 2023 version, the 2024 kind of gazetted version, and
65. 9:23Speaker 1: then a rewritten 2025 version. What has actually changed between them and why does it matter?
66. 9:30Speaker 2: Yeah, so we needed a new curriculum. It had been a long time since the last new curriculum. There was general consensus that that curriculum was too vague. It didn't
67. 9:41Speaker 2: give teachers enough support as to what actually needed to be taught on a year-by-year basis. And it was actually the Labour government that instigated the change, and they put
68. 9:52Speaker 2: out a curriculum in 2023. They did specify each year what should be taught each year in maths, and that
69. 9:59Speaker 2: was a really important move to make. Then the National Party came in and they rewrote that curriculum. And I mean, I suspect the reason for rewriting it as the 2023
70. 10:11Speaker 2: version was a strongly bicultural curriculum. It had Te Tiriti embedded all the way through it, and that's not so much the priorities of the national government. So they rewrote
71. 10:23Speaker 2: it and switched in a whole lot of explicit teaching using the language of so-called science of learning. Yet it
72. 10:32Speaker 2: retained the year-by-year guidance and progressions which was needed. The 2025 version was an enormous surprise for everyone because the
73. 10:42Speaker 2: 2024 version was gazetted and teachers were using it in 2025 and they were getting to grips with it and they were faithfully learning it on the go because they
74. 10:52Speaker 2: were told to use it and immediately had to use it without any kind of preparation time. So they poured an enormous amount of effort into learning it. They were
75. 11:02Speaker 2: receiving professional learning and development on how to implement it.
76. 11:06Speaker 2: And then it was a massive surprise that they suddenly changed it completely, and the structure of the curriculum changed,
77. 11:14Speaker 2: the language of it changed. It was just this enormous surprise for teachers that this should happen, and we don't
78. 11:23Speaker 2: have a good answer as to why this would happen.
79. 11:26Speaker 2: It seems to be that the curriculum came from a consultancy group in Australia, and they We're unsure about what
80. 11:36Speaker 2: role that group is playing in our education system, but it just did land in our laps and teachers had to suddenly pivot and create yet another new curriculum, which
81. 11:46Speaker 2: was quite daunting, I think. Yeah.
82. 11:50Speaker 1: And so what do you think should happen now? Should we just like hit pause on that, go back to like the 2024 version, kind of revise it a little bit?
83. 11:58Speaker 2: What should change? I would rather we go back to one of the previous versions, but I also don't want to suggest anything that involves yet more change for the
84. 12:09Speaker 2: teaching community. You've got to remember that at primary and intermediate school, the teachers are coping with all of the curriculum areas. So when they were given a new English
85. 12:21Speaker 2: curriculum and a new maths curriculum to implement all at once at the same time, that's already a big ask because...
86. 12:29Speaker 2: You know, they have to develop the new learning resources and teaching on the go. So I think the best thing to do would be to hit pause and to
87. 12:39Speaker 2: slow down the rollout of new curricula. There's a lot of criticism about the other subject areas curricula that are
88. 12:47Speaker 2: coming out. And I think a wise government would hit pause and listen to what the experts in the sector
89. 12:56Speaker 2: are saying about these curricula and then consider whether whether they really are ready to be rolled out into schools
90. 13:04Speaker 2: as they are, that would be my recommendation.
91. 13:06Speaker 1: Yeah, it seems to me, I mean, all the changes of these different curricula, and this is just coming completely from somebody who stopped doing maths at the age of 16,
92. 13:18Speaker 1: so I may be completely wrong, but organising a mathematics curriculum over those kind of year levels would seem to me simpler than to work out than the rest of them.
93. 13:29Speaker 1: I mean, you've got adding, subtracting percentages. You know, it kind of seems more cut and dry than the other ones.
94. 13:36Speaker 2: So why fiddle with it? I mean, we're constantly learning about good pedagogies. We're constantly learning about the best approaches
95. 13:47Speaker 2: to deliver a curriculum. But we're also living in a changing society where certain people certain content area is more
96. 13:56Speaker 2: needed than other content area. And this is something that's a little bit contentious because the direction of these new
97. 14:05Speaker 2: curricula have been called knowledge rich. And so the focus on them have been all about facts to remember and
98. 14:15Speaker 2: skills to do. The alternative way of looking at curriculum is to integrate the processes. So how to problem solve,
99. 14:24Speaker 2: how to communicate mathematical thinking, how to develop logical thinking.
100. 14:30Speaker 2: So those are the kinds of processes. So you've got the, always in all curriculum, you've got to have this balance of processes and content. And so we're kind of, in
101. 14:41Speaker 2: this rewrite, we're moving really heavily to memorise type learning, which is what advisors of the minister are really pushing for.
102. 14:53Speaker 2: In my own opinion, we're actually at a time in society where memorizing is less valuable. We actually want our students to be able to think critically and solve problems
103. 15:05Speaker 2: because they're inheriting a world that is very complicated and challenging, and we don't know what it's going to look like by the time they graduate. They need to be able
104. 15:13Speaker 2: to to engage critically with the world and engage critically with information, not just regurgitate facts. Because let's face it, they have access to all those facts in their back
105. 15:25Speaker 2: pocket at all times. We all do. So my own opinion is we need a curriculum that actually develop those
106. 15:34Speaker 2: sorts of skills alongside content. Absolutely, you need content. There's no one arguing that we don't need to learn our times tables in primary school because they are foundational for
107. 15:45Speaker 2: learning fractions, which is foundational for learning algebra, which is the language of mathematics. All of those things, no one argues.
108. 15:52Speaker 2: We need all those things at certain time points.
109. 15:56Speaker 1: In terms of the future, and when you see these headlines of, you know, 15 year olds have got the worst math score in history, or these year eights have
110. 16:08Speaker 1: got the worst math score in the last 10 years, etc.
111. 16:11Speaker 1: What worries you the most about the future and how these kind of numbers are portrayed?
112. 16:16Speaker 2: Yeah, sometimes when I see these sorts of headlines, it just re-emphasises the point that we need to be teaching critical thinking and we need to be teaching statistical literacy.
113. 16:25Speaker 2: And this is something that New Zealand has done traditionally extremely well in worldwide. We outperform the other nations in our statistical thinking because we're kind of leading the world
114. 16:37Speaker 2: in statistics. We actually have people coming over to New Zealand from the rest of the world copying our curriculum in statistics. And part of that statistical literacy is being
115. 16:48Speaker 2: able to read a headline, see those stats and question how they got there. You know, what was the information
116. 16:57Speaker 2: that was collected that generated that statistic? And the critical thinking is what agenda might be behind wanting to promote that statistic? And here we go back to the politicking.
117. 17:09Speaker 2: If you're at the beginning of your time in government, you're going to want to paint a picture that everything is dire and you're going to fix it. But if
118. 17:19Speaker 2: you're at the end of your three years, you want to be painting a picture that you've done an amazing job and everything is going really well. We just need to carry on. And I mean, what we want in
119. 17:30Speaker 2: education is to go a little bit outside of those politics and perhaps set them apart and have kind of a bipartisan approach to education where we can just say, well,
120. 17:41Speaker 2: what's actually good for the teachers and the students in our country? And what, you know, what's the bottom line?
121. 17:47Speaker 2: What can we do that's remove it from the politics a little bit more? Thanks for joining us, Lisa. Oh, you're welcome.
122. 17:57Speaker 1: That's it for this episode of The Front Page. You can read more about today's stories and extensive news coverage
123. 18:04Speaker 1: at nzherald.co.nz. The Front Page is hosted and produced by me, Chelsea Daniels. Kane Dickey is our studio operator, Richard Martin,
124. 18:14Speaker 1: our producer and editor, and our executive producer is Jane Yee.
125. 18:19Speaker 1: Follow The Front Page on the iHeart app or wherever you get your podcasts. And join us next time for another look beyond the headlines.