Secondary Teachers Call For End To Academic Streaming

Secondary teachers have called today for an end to academic streaming by 2030 because of the educational harm it is causing to Māori and Pasifika students.

PPTA Te Wehengarua annual conference delegates, representing 20,000 secondary teachers around the motu, acknowledged the historic and present harm caused to rangatahi Māori and Pasifika students 
through the practice of streaming and will advocate for more resourcing to enable schools to move away from streaming by 2030.

“Research shows that streaming creates and exacerbates inequity and it helps perpetuate influences from the social class background, by segretating students 
from different social classes in different streams,” says Melanie Webber, President of PPTA Te Wehengarua.

“As PPTA Te Wehengarua members we have a constitutional responsibility to affirm and advance Te Tiriti o Waitangi and show leadership in 
responding to practices that are preventing rangatahi Māori from achieving their full potential. As the professional body of secondary teachers, 
PPTA has a responsiblity to promote best professional practice in teaching and learning.

“By 2030 about 30% of our students will be Māori and 17% Pasifika. The best time to create a more equitable education system, and society, was yesterday.”

Compelling evidence for ending streaming was provided in research carried out by social innovation group Tokona Te Raki and the NZ Association of Mathematics Teachers 
into four North Island secondary schools that had stopped streaming in their mathematics programmes.

The research found that: academic achievement improved, especially for Māori and Pasifika students with more NCEA merits and excellences; 
Māori and Pasifika students studied mathematics for longer; student self-belief, motivation and aspiration improved; and social and ethnic barriers 
came down as students worked cooperatively in heterogenous classes.

Melanie Webber said streaming had effectively been masking the inadequacies and under-staffing of the school system in Aotearoa New Zealand. 
“Lack of adequate staffing has led to large class sizes and streaming or banding is used to make that situation more manageable. Māori and Pasifika students 
bear an inequitable burden of this ‘work around’ and this must not continue.”

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