The Education Ministry said the new curriculums were much clearer about what needed to be taught each year. Photo: 123RF
The Education Ministry says its staff have a clear understanding of what the term 'knowledge-rich' means.
A ministry document from March warned its work on the new school curriculum was suffering because it did not have a clear definition of the term, which was central to the entire project.
But the ministry's acting curriculum centre hautu (leader) Pauline Cleaver told RNZ's Midday Report it was not a problem.
"It's fully understood by our team and our PLD [professional learning and development], alongside the curriculum that we've already produced is working really well and our response from teachers about the English curriculum for Year 1 to 8 and the maths is going really well. People are really seeing what a knowledge-rich curriculum looks like," she said.
Cleaver said the already-published curriculums were examples of knowledge-rich.
"It's really well structured, it's got clear content. The things that we want young people to know and the things that we want them to know how to do, they're sequenced in a year-by-year way so that the knowledge builds over time and they get a nice coherent learning pathway. That the learning is managed and taught in nice structured ways, such as you see through our structured literacy programmes and their teachers have real clarity on what needs to be taught and what students should be learning at any particular point on the pathway."
She said the new curriculums were much clearer about what needed to be taught each year.
But Principals Federation president Leanne Otene told RNZ the curriculum changes were chaotic and imploding.
She said the government was changing too much, too fast and the training for teachers and principals was insufficient.
"We've had multiple announcements, and they're disconnected initiatives and they are creating chaos," she said.
Otene said primary schools were teaching new English and maths curriculums without sufficient training and without assessment tools to test children's achievement against the new curriculums.
She said the key ideas underpinning the curriculum change, science of learning and knowledge rich were "mentioned everywhere, defined nowhere"
PPTA vice-president Kieran Gainsford said at a recent meeting of subject association leaders, many were worried that the government had not provided a clear explanation of what it meant by terms like "science of learning" and "knowledge-rich curriculum".
"It leaves schools and teachers in almost a hopeless position. If we're supposed to implement a new curriculum, we want to do a good job. We want to do the best for the young people in front of us. But if we're given such unclear guidance, that leaves us in a very difficult position to be able to do that," he said.
Meanwhile, Cleaver told RNZ the ministry was using AI to help with background work on the curriculum.
"We have used AI to help us synthesise a range of research, what other countries are doing, how we're comparing with the content we're choosing to make sure we're doing the best job possible. It's not a replacement for our writers. It's information that our writers can use to be more effective at making sure we get this right," she said.
"It's not writing the curriculum now. We have real teachers, real educators writing the content."
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