A rushed new maths curriculum doesn’t add up. The right answer is more time

If the recent news of a new mathematics and statistics curriculum for years 0–10 felt familiar, that’s because it was.

In term four last year, the Ministry of Education released a previous new maths (and English) curriculum for Years 0–8, to be implemented from term one this year.

Schools must use the latest new curriculum from term one next year. This will be the third curriculum for primary and intermediate schools in less than three years.

Despite claims that the most recent curriculum is only an “update”, the changes are bigger than teachers might have expected.

The new curriculum is more difficult and more full. There is now a longer list of maths procedures and vocabulary to be memorised at each year of school.

For example, year 3 children should learn there are 366 days in a leap year and that leap years happen every four years. Year 5 students should know what acute, obtuse and reflex angles are.

Some concepts have been moved into earlier years. Year 6 children will learn calculations with rational numbers (such as “75% is 24, find the whole amount”), whereas previously this would have been taught at year 8. (If you’re wondering, the whole amount is 32.)

Cubes and cube roots have been moved a year earlier. A lot of statistics, a traditional area of strength for New Zealand in international tests, has been stripped out.

Much of the “effective maths teaching” material about clearly explaining concepts and planning for challenging problem solving has been removed. Also gone are the “teaching considerations” that helped guide teachers on appropriate ways to teach the content.

The maths children should learn was previously broken up into what they needed to “understand, know and do” – the UKD model. But this has changed to “knowledge” and “practices”.

In short, there are new things to teach, things to teach in different years, and the whole curriculum is harder and structured differently. It is effectively a new curriculum.

Not just a document

Most teachers now have about eight school weeks to plan for the changes, alongside teaching, planning, marking, reporting, pastoral support and extracurricular activities.

For busy schools heading into the end of the school year, the timeline is unrealistic, some say a “nightmare”.

For secondary teachers, who will be making changes in years 9 and 10, this is the first major curriculum change since 2007.

Primary and intermediate teachers, who have worked hard this year getting up to speed with a new curriculum that will soon expire, might legitimately ask why they bothered.

A curriculum change is a big deal in a school, something that normally happens once in a decade or more. A curriculum is not just a document, it is used every day for planning, teaching and assessment. Any change requires more lead time than this.

When England launched a new National Curriculum in 2013, teachers had it 12 months ahead of implementation. Singapore, a country whose education system Education Minister Erica Stanford paints as exemplary, gave teachers two years to prepare for the secondary maths curriculum change in 2020.

Expecting teachers to prepare for major curriculum changes in eight weeks is not only unnecessarily rushed and stressful – it is also a risk to children’s learning.

Time to slow down

Term one next year also marks the implementation of the new “student monitoring, assessment and reporting tool” (SMART) which teachers have not yet seen.

Children in Years 3–10 will take maths tests twice a year and will be described as emerging, developing, consolidating, proficient or exceeding. Children in the top three categories (during the year) or top two categories (at the end of year) are “on track”.

For the rest, the curriculum says “teachers will need to adjust classroom practice, develop individualised responses, or trigger additional learning support”.

The original curriculum rewrite shifted the goalposts – only 22% of year 8 students would be at the “expectation” level, compared with 42% previously – and this curriculum shifts those goalposts further.

The inevitably poorer results from testing against a more challenging curriculum risk damaging children’s self confidence, disappointing parents and placing blame on teachers.

Test results may improve in later years, compared to those produced in the first year of assessment against a harder curriculum that will take time to embed. But that will not necessarily be evidence the change was justified.

Pausing this latest curriculum change for at least 12 months would give time for adequate consultation and preparation. That would be more consistent with the change processes of education systems internationally.

According to a recent report from the Education Review Office, teachers have mostly demonstrated professionalism in their conscientious adoption of the previous curriculum.

In our view, the most recent changes will severely test that goodwill.