Building the secondary curriculum on broken drafts is a serious risk

“Submissions from subject associations – reported in the media today - make it clear that the proposed curriculum is not fit for purpose, it’s confusing, it will take students back 60 or 70 years, the time allocations for particular subjects are very unrealistic,  and some curriculum documents make totally false assumptions about students and teachers.

“It is really clear that teachers – the professionals who know their subjects inside out - have been excluded from the curriculum development process and the results of that are extremely concerning.

“We are highly concerned with what the senior secondary (Year 11-13) draft curriculum that is due to be released this month will look like. There is no way the secondary material is going to be able to be changed to reflect the feedback that has been given for the junior curriculum.”

Chris Abercrombie said he was mystified and extremely concerned that teachers were not being meaningfully involved in the process for designing and developing the new qualifications and assessment system for senior secondary school students.

“Qualifications and assessment are secondary teachers’ bread and butter – we live and breathe this work. Yet PPTA Te Wehengarua, as the representative of 22,000 secondary teachers throughout the motu, has been actively and deliberately locked out of the process for developing the changes.

“We have been excluded from the targeted consultation that has been taking place over the last couple of months and the submissions from the consultation have not been released. We wrote to the Ministry of Education on several occasions, requesting that we be involved, but we have been ignored.

“For someone who says she really values teachers and our amazing work, the education minister has a very peculiar way of showing it. Locking teachers out of these change processes does not bode well at all for their success.

“Teachers are an integral part of delivering these changes, making sure they work for students, and that parents have confidence in them – excluding teachers from the process just doesn’t make any sense and is a very unwise step.”