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The year 2020 was one none of us will forget in a hurry. Lives were put on hold. Read more

A well-functioning education system that delivers good outcomes for all is essential to New Zealand's future prosperity and the wellbeing of its people. However, there have been a number of recent reports highlighting our declining educational performance. Read more

New Zealand faces its worst recession in nearly a century. Unfortunately, the economic response to the challenges of Covid-19 leaves much to be desired. Read more

There is a rot at the core of schooling in New Zealand. The Ministry of Education follows unscientific advice and is in thrall to a flawed philosophy. Read more

This research note takes a closer look at school effectiveness across state, state-integrated, and private schools, otherwise defined as school authority (or type) using the Initiative's school performance tool. In a New Zealand first, we estimate each school’s contribution to student achievement across the three school authorities after separating out the contribution of the family socioeconomic background using data from Statistics New Zealand’s Integrated Data Infrastructure (IDI). Read more

New Zealand’s universities have, at least since the mid-2000s, relied on foreign students for substantial parts of their income. Though the extent of foreign students’ contributions is obvious to anyone working in academia, they are not well appreciated outside the tertiary sector. Read more

This research note is the third in a series of reports discussing the Initiative’s school performance tool and school evaluation in New Zealand. We present three case studies showing how three secondary schools performed before and after our tool separated the contribution of family background from the contribution of each school. Read more

For most of history, only the wealthiest in society had the time and resources to pursue disciplinary knowledge. For everyone else, knowledge beyond daily experience was an unaffordable luxury. Read more

Yesterday, the government announced that New Zealand’s decile-based school funding system would be replaced, from 2021, by a funding formula tied to student risk factors. It noted that parents too often conflate a school’s decile rank with its quality. Read more

School evaluation is an essential component of the education system. Identifying high-performing and underperforming schools is vital for building an evidence base for what works to improve education outcomes for students. Read more