What’s Trending With Kiwi Students? CensusAtSchool 2025 Kicks Off

CensusAtSchool New Zealand – TataurangaKiTeKura Aotearoa launches today its twelfth biennial survey, giving students across Aotearoa the opportunity to explore real-world data about themselves. This large-scale national survey offers a fascinating snapshot of young people's lives, experiences, and opinions.

Over the coming months, tens of thousands of students from Years 3–13 will take part, answering questions about everything from their screen time and tech use to their favourite foods, pets, sleep habits, gaming behaviour, and even what word they think is currently trending.

Supervised by teachers, students complete the survey anonymously online in English or te reo Māori. Alongside answering questions, they engage in hands-on activities such as measuring their height, foot length, wrist and thumb circumference, and testing their reaction speed and balance by timing how long they can stand on one leg with their eyes closed.

CensusAtSchool is a non-profit educational project, designed to make statistics engaging and relevant for tamariki and rangatahi. It is run by the Department of Statistics at the University of Auckland, in collaboration with the Ministry of Education and Stats NZ.

Rachel Cunliffe, co-director of CensusAtSchool, says:
“CensusAtSchool is such a brilliant way to bring statistics to life in the classroom! We’re putting real, relevant data into students’ hands so they can explore what life is like for their generation—while also growing their data science superpower skills.”

Pip Arnold, Statistics Educator and CensusAtSchool Resource Coordinator, says:
“CensusAtSchool gives students a unique opportunity to engage as both participants and data detectives. Since the first New Zealand survey in 2003, participation has grown significantly, and we’ve continually developed resources to support students and teachers. These resources help students collect quality data, understand the process of designing questionnaires, and explore CensusAtSchool data in ways that align with current curriculum needs.”

The 2025 edition of CensusAtSchool is expected to be the biggest yet, with over 50,000 students anticipated to participate. As of launch day, 863 teachers from 490 schools have already registered.

Check out the questionnaire, explore the live dashboard, and see which schools are participating at: www.censusatschool.org.nz

© Scoop Media