John Gerritsen asks why New Zealand students have been performing so badly in maths and science, and whether we will see any improvement with this year’s cohort.

Sadly, in the entire 27-minute report, there’s nothing to suggest the Ministry of Education is doing anything at all to address the Numeracy Project. Instead, (22:14) “the greatest potential for change lies with teachers themselves”, and “helping teachers to do that is everyone’s responsibility, not just the Ministry’s”.

It is not right that the Ministry spent $70M getting us into this mess and now it’s everyone’s responsibility to help the teachers out of it, but at least some of us are indeed taking up that responsibility. We have to, for the sake of our children.