Photo: RNZ
Should a five-year-old be able to count to 10 and accurately describe shapes?
The draft Year 0-6 English and Year 0-8 maths curriculums expect they will be able to do that, and more, after six months at school.
The curriculums are out for consultation and the government is rushing to introduce them next year.
The Ministry of Education (MOE) says the drafts are designed to be much clearer than the previous document, especially in terms of what children should learn at each year level.
They also include guidance for teachers - suggestions of what they should teach and how.
Underpinning both documents is the "science of learning", which the MOE says is basically a well-sequenced approach to teaching that ensures children master one skill or area of knowledge before moving on to the next.
A big change in the English curriculum is a nation-wide shift to "structured literacy" as the approach for teaching children in Years 0-3 to read.
Focused on teaching children to decode words and understand the sounds represented by letters and groups of letters, it has emerged triumphant from the so-called "reading wars".
The move to structured literacy began under the previous government and most schools spoken to by RNZ are enthusiastic about its effectiveness.
It means families can expect to see young children learning to read from books that emphasise particular sounds with sentences like "Can Nan nap?" and "Nat taps on a pot".
The draft English curriculum also includes more of a focus on punctuation, grammar and spelling than the current document.
That has led University of Auckland associate professor Aaron Wilson to describe it as more a literacy curriculum than an English curriculum.
Meanwhile, the maths curriculum is aiming for significant acceleration in what children learn in the subject that is without doubt New Zealand education's weak spot.
Initial testing indicated just 20 percent of Year 3 children and 22 percent of Year 8s would meet its expectations, a sharp contrast to the current curriculum where 82 percent of Year 4s and 42 percent of Year 8s are at the level expected of them.
Julia Novak from the MOE told RNZ the new curriculum would be more explicit about ensuring young children mastered the basics of maths so they had the skills and knowledge they needed by Year 8.
"They are seeing fractions sooner than they were before ... using addition, subtraction, multiplication and division a little sooner than before," she said.
Both the English and maths curriculums specify what children should be learning each year they are at school.
That is a big change from the current system of broad curriculum levels that cover a number of year levels.
For example, curriculum level four applies mostly to children in the final year of intermediate school, Year 8, but children in Years 6, 7, 9 and 10 could also be working at that level.
The curriculums also include guidance for teachers on what they should teach and how.
For example the English curriculum advises teachers of Year 4-6 to "teach students to segment words into syllables and phonemes" when covering spelling and to "teach spelling every day".
Ellen MacGregor-Reid from the MOE said the advice built on the Common Practice Model developed under the previous government.
She said it was aimed at ensuring teachers were using proven approaches to teaching, increasing consistency between schools, and reducing teacher workloads.
"It's not about taking away teachers bring things to life in an exciting way. It is about providing that clarity about across all of this learning at different year levels, what is important to teach," she said.
What do teachers think?
Teachers and principals agree the curriculum needs to change.
Many welcomed the increased specificity about what to teach and when, but some worried it might go too far and restrain teachers' professional judgement.
They also warn that the government is moving too fast. Consultation on the drafts was open for just four weeks and schools are expected to start using the documents from the start of next year.
Principals say that is totally unrealistic.
Minister of Education Erica Stanford has been at pains to reassure teachers.
She said there was no expectation that schools would use the curriculums perfectly from day one next year and there would be more teacher training and resources to help them.
But she said the government needed to crack on with the changes - too many children are struggling with reading, writing and maths and change has to start now.
Also of concern to teachers is the shift to year-by-year achievement expectations.
They say children develop at different speeds, especially in the early years, and expecting all children of a certain age to meet particular benchmarks is not realistic.
Is literacy and numeracy really as bad as the government says?
National studies of children's achievement show the percentage of children achieving at the curriculum level expected of them declines as they get older and curriculum expectations increase.
By the time they were finishing Year 8, generally the final year of intermediate or primary school, 47 percent of children were at the expected curriculum level in reading and 42 percent were at the expected level in maths.
The Council for Educational Research, which conducted the research with the University of Otago, said there had been no real change in Year 8 children's maths achievement over the past 10 years.
They also tested children against the draft maths curriculum and found that only 22 percent of Year 8s met its expectations.
The government headlined that figure when announcing the results earlier this year, and principals are still angry about it, saying the government misrepresented the facts to create a sense of crisis.
However, the OECD's international PISA tests of 15-year-olds shows a steady decline in New Zealand teens' scores in reading and maths with this country most-recently ranked 10th in reading and 23rd in maths in the 2022 round of tests.
The tests found 21 percent of New Zealand 15-year-olds were reading at the lowest level - meaning they struggled with all but the simplest reading tasks - and in maths 29 percent performed at the lowest level.
Meanwhile secondary schools are warning that too many students, especially among Māori, Pacific and poor communities are failing new NCEA reading, writing and numeracy tests designed to ensure teens leave school with basic literacy and numeracy.
In May about 55,000 teens attempted the tests with pass rates of 59 percent in reading, 56 percent in writing, and 46 percent in numeracy.
A second round of tests will be held in September.
While the new curriculums raise the bar for what is expected of children, it is not a given that they will raise achievement.
Stanford is confident that improvement will happen quickly, especially in maths.
Certainly the changes should scoop up any schools or teachers that have been neglecting reading, writing and maths or teaching those subjects badly.
But teachers warn they need ongoing professional development and good resources for years to come to ensure any improvements stick.
