Photo: RNZ / Richard Tindiller
Teacher education providers warn there is strong evidence the timing of a new maths test for would-be primary teaching students will halve enrolments in some courses, worsening teacher shortages.
The Literacy and Numeracy for Adults Assessment Tool (LNAAT) will become a pre-requisite for entry to one-year English-medium postgraduate programmes next year, and for multi-year programmes such as Bachelor's degrees in 2027.
Students who enrolled this year in English-medium primary teaching courses would have to pass the one-hour test, which was developed for the Tertiary Education Commission and administered by the Council for Educational Research, before they graduated.
The change was prompted by the government's push to raise maths achievement.
Lecturers told RNZ the LNAAT was a good measure of teachers' maths ability but making it a condition of entry rather than requiring students pass the test during their course of study was a mistake.
Their fears were based on Otago University's 15-year history of using the LNAAT with its students.
Otago's associate dean of initial teacher education, Naomi Ingram, said the test's content was very close to the knowledge primary school teachers required and much closer than the requirements of NCEA Level 2 maths which was originally expected to be the benchmark for entry.
But she said requiring students pass the test before they were accepted to a teacher education programme was a bad idea.
"We've got 15 years of data to show that the first time they attempt this assessment our primary teachers in our initial teacher education programme, about half of them pass it," Ingram said.
"Some of these people might be older students who just haven't done fractions for a while or there might be people that have genuine gaps in their knowledge.
"It's going to have a massive impact on teacher supply and teacher supply is a problem in primary so I'm very concerned about that."
Ingram said by the end of Otago's three-year degree all students who successfully completed all other aspects of the programme passed the test, though some required tuition or resources to get there.
She said students enrolled in one-year, postgraduate teaching courses tended to do a lot better in the test.
Ingram said students tended to struggle most with "proportional reasoning" involving fractions, finding percentages, place values and metric conversion.
Education Ministry figures showed in recent years more than half of the graduates from primary teaching programmes were from Bachelor's degree programmes and in 2023, the most recent year for which statistics were available, the figure was 70 percent.
Anthony Fisher from Early Childhood New Zealand Te Rito Maioha said its degree students would attempt the test next semester but students in its one-year programme had already sat it, with most passing.
Fisher said the high pass rate was probably because the one-year students already had a degree.
"They've come in with a prior degree so their level of mathematics is probably at a different level to some people coming into a three-year programme," he said.
Fisher said making the test an enrolment requirement would lower student numbers.
"As an entry requirement it's definitely going to have an impact on students. I think particularly a number of students who have I suppose what we could term maths anxiety," he said.
"It will be a definite barrier I think for some students coming into primary teaching."
The chair of universities' Council of Deans of Education, Joce Nuttall from the University of Canterbury said universities had pre-entry literacy and numeracy tests for years and its members "absolutely support" the need for graduates to be mathematically competent.
Nuttall said students who failed the test on their first attempt this year would get extra support and the university was confident all students would pass it before graduation.
"What we're more concerned about is that students who have to sit the test before they get into teacher education from next year. If they don't pass the test we may lose them," she said.
Nuttall said deans of education hoped the Teaching Council would change the rules.
"We'd really like to see the test incorporated within our courses rather than something that's required prior to entry. That would bring us in line with very similar testing systems in Australia," she said.
The Teaching Council said the decision to make the test a prerequisite for enrolment was reached after consultation.
It said candidates would be allowed two attempts at the assessment, the second time a month after the first.
In addition, providers could seek exemptions allowing them to offer post-entry assessment for candidates who met conditions such as being strong candidates in other respects.
"Partly due to these mitigations, we expect that the mathematics requirement is likely to have only a modest impact on supply of candidates entering English-medium primary ITE programmes," it said.
"We will, however, work with the Ministry of Education as the mathematics entry requirement policy is implemented to achieve the best possible understanding of teacher supply impacts and we will consider changes to the policy settings if needed."
The council said it initially considered allowing entry for students who had NCEA maths credits at Level 2.
"Concerns were, however, raised by sector experts about unintended consequences from the use of this measure. In addition, we had already identified that another assessment would need to be available since it would not be fair or possible to rely solely on a candidate's school record," it said.
Sign up for Ngā Pitopito Kōrero, a daily newsletter curated by our editors and delivered straight to your inbox every weekday.
