Strategic direction

The Ministry of Education is enabling the development of a world-leading education system to equip all New Zealanders with the knowledge, skills and values to be successful citizens in the 21st-century. As we move through the 21st-century we are becoming more comfortable with rapid change, with how technology is used and is useful, and how connected we are and must be with the rest of the world. The education system has a key role in sustaining that development and change.

There is a growing focus on how skills and knowledge are viewed and transferred. Education has always been about knowledge. However, the focus is shifting from the transfer of specific knowledge to an emphasis on developing the skills to use and create new knowledge. There is growing recognition of the importance of tailoring approaches to meet the needs of diverse learners. This means that the Ministry of Education and the education sector as a whole need to continue to change to advance the wider role of education, skills and knowledge as foundations of social and economic development.

Government goals

The Government is focusing on five themes. Education must contribute to all five, with a particular focus on Economic Transformation in the tertiary sector, and on Families, Young and Old, in early childhood education and schooling:

• Economic Transformation – working towards a thriving and internationally competitive economy with a highly-skilled workforce

Education contributes to a more highly-skilled, adaptable, innovative and productive workforce and generates new knowledge. This leads to improved economic performance and a better standard of living for all New Zealanders.

A more highly-skilled and innovative workforce impacts both directly and indirectly on economic growth. It increases labour productivity for individual workers, and supports innovation, entrepreneurship and building industry capacity to adapt to changing technologies and markets.

• National Identity – building pride in who we are, where we live and what we do

Education enables New Zealanders to develop the values and competencies they need to participate fully in our society. These values and competencies are reflected in Te Whāriki, The New Zealand Curriculum, and the Tertiary Education Strategy. The Government recognises the Māori language as a taonga guaranteed to Māori by the Treaty of Waitangi, and is committed to supporting its revitalisation. As an official language, te reo Māori offers academic, cultural, social and linguistic benefits for all New Zealanders. This in turn supports the development and celebration of our national identity and protects the distinctiveness of indigenous people.

• Families, Young and Old – providing opportunity and security, backed up by excellent services to family members of every age

Education ensures that people succeed and have opportunities to participate fully in society and in the workforce. This helps to reduce social and economic disparities. We are focused on this goal, with population-based strategies such as Ka Hikitia – Managing for Success, the Pasifika Education Plan, and Better Outcomes for Children providing the framework to ensure investments are tailored to help individuals achieve their potential. Professional development and resources support teachers to become more effective by strengthening the relationship between teacher and learner.

Education has a role to support learners, parents, family and whānau to become more discerning, aware and confident in terms of what they should be expecting from the education system. The ministry contributes to parents, family and whānau through provision of knowledge and evidence.

• Sustainable Development – developing long-term sustainable strategies for our economy, society, environment, culture and way of life

Education helps New Zealanders to develop the skills and knowledge to balance the pressures of social and economic progress on the environment and natural resources.

New Zealand’s future is dependent on long-term sustainable strategies for our economy, society, environment, culture and way of life. Education and knowledge-transfer can add value to primary production, help manage pressure on natural resources, and help restore our indigenous ecosystems and biodiversity.

Education providers and government education agencies make up a significant sector of the New Zealand economy. Education organisations have a responsibility to improve the sustainability of their own organisational work practices and to influence the sector’s focus on sustainability.

• Schools Plus – the Government’s policy is for all young people to be in education, skills or other structured learning, relevant to their abilities and needs, until they reach the age of 18

Education helps young New Zealanders to reach their full potential, and ensures that the economy has the skilled workers it needs. Our focus is on ensuring that young people stay in some form of education, skills or other structured learning until at least the age 18.

Ministry of Education priority outcomes

To ensure that we deliver education’s contribution to the Government goals, we have established a set of priority outcomes which will guide the ministry’s work over the next five years.

We have an education system that performs well, and in comparison with international standards, New Zealand students on average perform very well. However, we need to focus effort and resources on critical points in the education system to increase learners’ participation, engagement and achievement. We will do this by investing in opportunities to ensure all learners achieve their potential. This means tailoring our investments to perform better for and with Māori learners, Pasifika learners, children with specific barriers to learning and communities in lower socioeconomic areas.

The outcomes and intermediate outcomes we are focused on over the next three to five years are:

• All children develop strong learning foundations
  - increasing participation in high-quality early childhood education
  - increasing literacy and numeracy achievement in primary school
  - earlier identification of and intervention for children with specific barriers to learning.
• All young people participate, engage and achieve in education
  - increasing engagement and achievement in secondary education so that young people stay at school longer and leave with higher-level qualifications
  - more successful pathways into tertiary education and work
  - higher levels of achievement in tertiary education by the age of 25.
• Learners have access to high-quality Māori language education that delivers positive learning and language outcomes
  - increasing numbers of high-quality teachers proficient in te reo Māori
  - increasing effectiveness of teaching and learning in and through te reo Māori.
• The education system produces the knowledge and develops people with the skills to drive New Zealand’s future economic and social success
  - building an education system for the 21st-century
  - increasing education’s contribution to economic transformation and innovation through new knowledge, skills and research.
• Education agencies work effectively and efficiently to achieve education outcomes
  - building leadership, accountability, relationships, competence and confidence.

In previous years we have focused on critical drivers of presence, engagement and achievement for all learners, namely:

• the effectiveness of the relationships that underpin teaching and learning
• family and community engagement
• providers focused on the use of evidence to support learning and achievement.

While these remain critical to achieving our outcomes, we are now making the outcomes we are seeking more visible, so our intentions are framed in terms of ensuring educational success at key stages of student learning and for specific population groups. The critical drivers above are still reflected in our work programmes.

1. Includes adult education, industry training and workplace learning
2. Ka Hikitia – Managing for Success is an overarching strategy which informs the way the ministry works as a whole, and supports specific actions to improve Māori student population outcomes.

Interdependencies

We cannot achieve these outcomes alone. The Development Goals for the State Services provide a framework for improving the performance of the education system and delivering better results. Our first two outcomes are focused on improving the system’s ability to deliver educational outcomes to specific groups of people in the early years of their education, and in senior secondary and tertiary education. This will require better coordination of education, health and social agencies, and more accessible services.

Seeking to achieve complex outcomes requires collective strategic leadership by all six government education agencies:

• Ministry of Education
• Education Review Office
• Career Services
• New Zealand Qualifications Authority
• New Zealand Teachers Council
• Tertiary Education Commission.

The Chief Executives of these six agencies work to the agreed set of shared sector outcomes described above, which inform operating intentions and are reflected in each agency’s Statement of Intent, under the leadership of the Secretary for Education. Together with the Chief Executives of the National Library of New Zealand, The Correspondence School and the Ministry of Research, Science and Technology, the education Chief Executives form the Education Sector Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) Standing Committee, which is responsible for driving the collaborative development and use of ICT across the education sector.

The Secretary for Education has a leadership role to strengthen coordination with other sectors and with other government agencies, and to monitor the education sector and education Crown entities.

Leading the Schools Plus initiative, the Secretary for Education chairs a governance group of chief executives from other agencies, including the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, the Department of Labour, the Ministry of Social Development, the State Services Commission, Te Puni Kōkiri, The Treasury and the Tertiary Education Commission. The group is responsible for overseeing Schools Plus, which is the cross-government initiative to realise youth potential through education.

The Secretary is a member of the Social Sector Forum (Health, Education, Social Development and Justice Chief Executives), which is responsible for national issues such as the Families, Young and Old budget, the Taskforce on Family Violence, and local issues such as combating youth gangs in South Auckland.

The ministry leads and participates in a number of other sector and cross-government forums, ensuring that education’s contribution is recognised and applied wherever possible for wider social and economic outcomes.

We are working with the Ministry of Economic Development, Ministry of Research, Science and Technology, New Zealand Trade and Enterprise, the Foundation for Research, Science and Technology and the Tertiary Education Commission to ensure that our priorities are well aligned and that our advice and investment is coordinated.

In order to support parents, family and whānau, and Pasifika communities to develop clear views on the quality and type of education provision they want for their children, we must support them to engage with early childhood education services, schools, non-governmental organisations, local government agencies and other local community groups. It is our role to raise accountability of early childhood education services and schools for their relationships with parents and communities, through implementing charters, planning and reporting; through boards of trustees and school communities; through expectations of school leaders and teachers; and through home-school partnerships and those with other community groups and providers.