Ngāi Tahu is leading an initiative to phase out streaming from New Zealand schools by 2030 but not all students want to see it end.
Grouping students by their abilities at school, or streaming, is common in New Zealand, especially for core subjects like maths, English and science.
Education expert Christine Rubie-Davies said we have one of the highest rates of streaming out of all countries in the OECD, according to a 2017 report from the OECD.
Rubie-Davies said streaming is “completely inequitable”, disadvantaging some students over others and affecting their life chances.
She also said there is no evidence it works, yet New Zealand keeps doing it.
Tokona te Raki, a social innovation company owned by Ngāi Tahu, is leading ‘Kōkirihia’, the move to end streaming.
New Zealand had a 23% decline in streaming between 2015 and 2022, according to the 2022 PISA report.
Re: News spoke to Rubie-Davies and Ngāi Tahu about how and why they think streaming should be phased out, as well as a current high school student who believes it still has a place in schools.
Issues with streaming
Rubie-Davies is a professor at the University of Auckland and said there’s a lot of issues with grouping students by ability.
“Kids who are in the top group tend to get high-level, challenging, exciting types of activities and the ones in the lowest groups often get boring repetitive worksheets.
“Because they’re being taught different things, then of course they achieve different things. And so overtime, this disparity increases.”
Māori and Pasifika students are disproportionately placed in lower streams, even when you account for their achievement, she said.
“You can imagine what it feels like to have been in the bottom group for year after year after year. Of course, those kids become demotivated and disengaged.
“The kids will talk about ‘I’m in the cabbage class’. That’s what they call the lowest stream.”
When students get to secondary school, Rubie-Davies said they tend to make friends with the students in their ability group.
If students are mixed up, they make a broad range of friends which allows for high level peer mentoring, she said.
She said streaming has been in New Zealand for 70 years, if not longer, and is a “hangover” from a British system.
She doesn’t think there’s any merit to students being able to learn at their own pace, which is the argument often used to keep streaming.
“Ability grouping and streaming has no effect on achievement…for the top kids, the middle kids and the bottom kids, it doesn’t matter where they are, it doesn’t benefit their learning at all by being grouped.”
“There’s also research that shows teachers think they know where kids are. But actually between a third and two-thirds of kids are misplaced. So a lot of kids are actually in the wrong group.”
What is High Expectation Teaching?
Rubie-Davies wants streaming to be replaced with High Expectation Teaching (HET), a model of teaching based on her research.
She said students that have high expectation teachers make, on average, two years of academic growth in one year.
In HET, there is no ability grouping, teachers create a warm classroom environment, students support each other and set personal goals based on their skills, she said.
If an English class was run using HET instead of streaming, Rubie-Davies said the teacher could provide a selection of novels to their students, which are of varying difficulty.
Students could choose which novel they’re most interested in and would be grouped together based on their novel, collaborating together on a range of activities about their book.
Student says streaming has a place at school
Maddie, who is using a fake name because she doesn’t want to be judged for her views, is a 17-year-old high school student living in North Canterbury who supports streaming.
She attends a large, high-decile school where senior classes are streamed but junior classes aren’t.
“When we had 60 kids in one space with two teachers, you had the complete idiots that were just being dicks and teachers would spend 15-20 minutes getting them organised then come on and teach for 20 minutes,” Maddie said.
“But it’s like I already know how to do this. I could have done the worksheet by now.
“[So] I got a bit of a resentment for school.”
A recent report from the Education Review Office found teachers spend 40-50 mins a day or more responding to challenging behaviour which limits the time available to teach.
Maddie had done streaming since primary school, and said she was usually in higher ability classes.
She said streaming typically allowed for smaller classroom sizes where individual students got more one-on-one time with teachers.
Maddie wants core subjects to stay streamed and all other subjects to have mixed-ability classrooms.
She said this combination allows students to do targeted work at their own level but still learn and socialise with each other outside of core subjects.
Not streaming core subjects can mean students with higher and lower abilities can hold each other back, she said.
“If you would be in a lower stream and you’re not streamed and you see all these people doing a lot harder stuff, you’re like ‘oh well, I can’t do that, I’m dumb.”
Maddie says streaming isn’t the problem, the style of teaching is
Maddie said if students in lower streams feel like school isn’t for them, there’s an issue with how they’re being educated and their teachers should build stronger relationships with them.
She said if those students are experiencing low self esteem, it’s partly because there’s a lot of value put into core subjects, which are streamed, and less value into other subjects and extracurriculars.
Ngāi Tahu’s drive to end streaming
Hana O’Regan is a Māori Language advocate and education expert from Kai Tahu.
Part of Ngāi Tahu’s interest in streaming can be traced to a report published by Tokona te Raki in 2020, which tracked more than 70,000 rangatahi Māori through education and into employment.
The report recommended ending streaming to enable Māori learners to succeed, O’Regan said.
“As a tribe, we looked at what our stance on this would be. What’s our responsibility, what role could we take.”
She said Ngāi Tahu collaborated with many groups, including the Ministry of Education (MoE) and the Mātauranga Iwi Leaders Group, for years before launching Kōkirihia in March 2023.
O’Regan said when schools sign up to Kōkirihia to end streaming, they receive support to take gradual steps and have to report on their progress.
She said it can be quite disheartening to see the harm streaming causes but she is excited to see the level of commitment people are making to phase it out.
Ministry of Education’s involvement in ending streaming
Sela Finau, general manager of learner success and tiriti policy at MoE, said individual schools may choose to stream their classes.
“There is, however, significant evidence that harmful streaming and inflexible ability grouping practices limit opportunities, aspirations, expectations and subsequent outcomes for learners.”
To help lift achievement, MoE is supporting schools to use evidence-based practice to support high quality teaching and learning within the context of their particular circumstances, Finau says.
“The Ministry of Education has an ongoing relationship with Tokona te Raki to support the implementation of Kōkirihia.”
