The new English curriculum is not the real enemy

The Spinoff

04-05-2025

A teacher at a formerly decile one secondary school outlines why the new proposed curriculum might help address inbuilt inequity in our education system.
This article is a response to an argument against the curriculum published on The Spinoff last week.
As I lay in an MRI machine today, I pondered what it was about the reaction to the new English curriculum that really grated on me. And through the loud growl of the machine, one word stuck out: inequity.
As an English teacher in a (formerly) decile one secondary school, where the majority of students are Pacific Island, Māori and Asian, our biggest barrier is the inequity built into the education system. As my eye mask and headphones kept me safely cocooned in the dark and stopped me from panicking about the walls curving around me, I thought how inequity is a constant shadow at school. It slinks through our hallways, hides in the dark corners and competes with the pūkeko in our playground for any scraps or crumbs of success. Luckily the voices and laughter of our students always chase away both the pūkeko and the shadows. But it is an ongoing battle we can't forget or defeat, yet.
So when other English departments and teachers in Aotearoa express frustration and anger about the new English curriculum, I have to wonder if they are fighting the same war we are. Because in my school community we fight every day to empower our students to succeed, despite the barriers they experience. Unfortunately it is students from low decile areas who often need specific, explicit teaching with clear sequences and connections, like the new curriculum proposes. Literacy is essential and no matter how smart a student is, without it, they are limited and their world will shrink. Our students deserve to have the same access to the world as anyone in the decile 10 school 20 minutes down the road.
If there was a turning point where schools and English departments should have made a joint decision to fight back, it was the introduction of the new Common Assessment Activities (CAAs); or the halving of school lunch budgets; or the continual erosion of learning support in our schools. All of these critical issues are linked to inequity and discrimination in our education system. Because these things all compound and, through no fault of their own, Māori and Pacific students are the ones who suffer the worst educational outcomes in Aotearoa.
When the new literacy CAAs were designed and trialled in schools in 2022, less than 3% of decile one students in the pilots passed the literacy (writing) assessments. This is a horrifying statistic and if anything should have mobilised English teachers to take a stand, it was that. There is a strong relationship between equity indexes and student achievement rates, with higher decile schools showing much higher achievement rates and low decile schools performing significantly lower than other schools.
Despite the discrimination inherent in those results, the CAAs were still introduced to NCEA with minimal revision. This is inequity in action and should have been condemned by everyone.
In 2018, New Zealand was revealed as having one of the least equitable education systems in the world. This inequity is sadly nothing new. New Zealand is ranked in the bottom third of countries across all three measures of educational inequality. Māori and Pacific children are less likely to receive the same opportunities as Pākehā and Asian children because they are disproportionately affected by financial and material hardship, and a system that doesn't meet their needs, according to further analysis commissioned by UNICEF.
It's time to try new ways to reduce the gaps in the system – our students deserve better and we should be advocating for them all to succeed. We owe all students the same opportunities and that might require us to leave the political distrust and dislike on the sidelines for now.
This new English curriculum is not the real enemy – the real enemy is the impact of inequity and discrimination on Māori and Pacific students. It is unforgivable that the blatant disparities in our education system have been ignored for so long. Sadly, most governments have done our Māori and Pacific students a major disservice in low decile schools.
We need a change. We need hope for our subject and our students. Reducing cognitive load by increasing what becomes automatic in English will hopefully lead to more creativity not less (ie. if reading and spelling and grammar become automatic there is less cognitive load on the brain which frees up space for higher level thinking and creativity). It will open up opportunities for more sophisticated thinking and hopefully it will mean we no longer get students who arrive in year nine English unable to read or write. Because that is truly heartbreaking.
The reality is that previous English curricula have not served all students equally and as teachers we need to face that difficult truth. Explicit teaching and stronger guidance about when and what to teach is not inherently bad just because it has been designed by a curriculum panel we are critical of. Yes, the removal of links to te ao Māori and Te Tiriti is deeply concerning, but we still have the freedom to choose our texts and plan units that connect to these fundamental principles we believe in so strongly. A more prescriptive curriculum is hopefully made more tolerable by the impact of structured literacy, giving us year 10 students who can use punctuation and grammar correctly and know what language features are!
Structured literacy, the science of learning, clear sequences for each year level and explicit teaching, could in fact be a way to reduce barriers to equity and inclusion and give all our students the opportunities and qualifications they deserve.
I know my students are bright, funny, insightful teenagers who have so much to offer and so much to teach us if we give them an equitable chance.