NZ ICT Strategy Speech APEC Bohol

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2008/HRDWG30/006

Session: Parallel

ICT in School Education: New Zealand’s e-Learning Strategy - Enabling the 21st Century Learner

Purpose: Information

Submitted by: New Zealand

ICT in school education: New Zealand’s e-learning strategy

Enabling the 21st Century Learner

Steve Benson, International Division

Ministry of Education,

P O Box 1666, Wellington

New Zealand

Kia ora, good morning. It is my pleasure today to outline to you some of the work we are doing in New Zealandto provideall our students with an education for the 21st century. This task by definition must involve the effective use of an increasing rangeof information and communications technologies.

New Zealand is a country with a small population of just over 4 million. We have a strong tradition of a well-funded state education system that has generally been responsive to new ideas and programmes. In 1989New Zealand schools became self-managing with the state providing resources but with schools having a great deal of flexibility to make financial and other critical decisions for themselves. Active governance and management of each school now rests with an elected Board of Trustees.

In the recently-published OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) results, New Zealand’s 15 year olds had high average scores and there were some world-leading results from our highest achievers.

Such success does not mean that all our students are achieving as well as they could. Nor does it mean that we are complacent about developing new programmes to capitalise on the opportunities offered by modern communication technologies. The Government has developed a comprehensive digital strategy that focuses heavily on the opportunities in education. More information is available on

A particular challenge for us is to try and ensure that students from lower socio-economic families have access to the Internet and the educational opportunities such access can provide.

Transforming the New Zealandeconomy means not just equipping young people with appropriate training and skills but also fostering a sense of inquiry, curiosity and responsibility. In November last yearwe published our revisednational curriculum. This document is not a syllabus or prescription but rather a framework setting out the policy direction for school education. It takes as its starting point, a vision of young New Zealanders who are confident, connected, actively involved and who will be lifelong learners. More information about our new curriculum can be seen on

Our curriculum includes a clear set of principles on which to base curriculum decision-making. It sets out important values that we want to foster in young people. Students are encouraged to value excellence, inquiry, equity, diversity,participation, integrity, and ecological sustainability and to respect themselves and others.

New Zealand is a very multi-ethnic and multicultural society. Today, one New Zealander in four was born outside our country. Our cities and regions are now home to more than 180 nationalities and Auckland is currently the most ethnically diverse city in the Southern hemisphere.

The challenge of cultural identity and language preservation for our indigenous people, the Maori, currently some 16% of the total New Zealand population, is a particular social and educational challenge. The use of modern technology in schools is an increasingly important tool in promoting the use of the Maori language and culture for all New Zealand pupils. More information on these programmes can be viewed under Maori Education on the Ministry of Education’s website

New Zealand’s priorities for the use of Information and Communications Technologies in schooling are contained in the document Enabling the 21st Century Learner and e-learning Action Plan for Schools 2006-10which can be viewed at

This plan has an underlying vision for schooling that at the heart of any 21st Century education system will be knowledge and communication networks. The plan builds on our 20 year history of embedding ICT in the curriculum to support teaching and learning rather than focussing on ICT as a discrete knowledge and skills area. Our strategy has always been more pedagogically driven than technology driven, with ICTs as enablers of teaching and learning given the most emphasis.

The approach in primary schools was always to distribute computers around classrooms to be part of the daily environment for learning. Secondary schools at the beginning tended to lock their computers away in labs but increasingly they have adopted the primary model and cascaded their early computers more and more around classrooms.

What has New Zealand done to provide schools with the resources to develop ICT in schools? We have some particular geographic and structural challenges in ensuring that all our schools have equitable access to the same quality and type of educational experiences.

New Zealand, like Chile or Japan, is a long, thin country made up of two mountainous islands separated by a deep stretch of water. All schools have Internet access of some form or other but speed and quality do vary. Many of our 2600 schools are small, 50% with less than 170 students, and many of these schools are in relatively isolated rural areas.

Many of the small rural high schools have experienced declining student rolls due to changes in farming and population. They often lack capacity to provide the full curriculum to senior students. One solution we are actively developing is the Virtual Learning Network (VLN).

The Virtual Learning Network (VLN) supports the concept of classrooms without walls. A place where students and educators have the flexibility to connect with their classes 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and where a rich and diverse range of courses, programmes and activities, from early childhood through to tertiary education, are offered by New Zealand-based educators.

This site connects teachers and learners; creates opportunities for schools to work together; and allows individuals to learn through online programmes and/or using video conferencing for curriculum support.

Courses are delivered by schools and tertiary institutions. They use video conferencing through the Education Ministry’s video conferencing bridge – complemented and supported by the Correspondence School – New Zealand’s long established distance learning provider for school age students.

We have also developed e-Mentoring for music education and are running a pilot programme using e-mentoring as part of ARTS online to deliver music lessons. The trial was established to examine the possibilities for real-time, online tuition. The programme is delivered through video-conferencing and website technologies. It is supported by some face-to-face lessons delivered to students.

Such opportunities for e-mentoring and the professional discussion around this can now be delivered to multi-point locations.

Students can mentor students, and community artists can work with schools and teachers to share their expertise. It provides support for teachers’ professional skills and knowledge no matter which region they live in, or the remoteness of their school or centre.

Schools are now planning to continue these music programmes, and extend opportunities for students, notably utilising the newly developed skills, knowledge and confidence of the students who took part in the project.

Another example is the e-mentoring programme using the Digital Conversations website where students are able to video-conference with experts from around the world.

As I mentioned earlier, a particular challenge is how to provide resources which make a meaningful difference to students who come from poorer households who don’t have computers or access to the net. This is one facet of our broader challenge to increase education achievement for those currently failing in the educational system who may well come from families who do not have a history of success in the system.

In New Zealand we have initially addressed the problems of wealth inequalities by classifying all state schools with a decile rating based on socio-economic data from the catchment served by each school. Using census data, a precise analysis of the socio-economic make up of each school’s parental community can be determined. Schools with the poorest average communities receive the most additional resourcing. In addition a number of ICT related initiatives have been introduced beyond the school gates including theComputers in Homesscheme which aims to reduce the disadvantages of the digital divide.

The Computers In Homes project supports low-income communities using ICT to strengthen their education. It is very much about what ICT can do to for family opportunity rather than a hardware dump or the learning of computer skills for their own sake.

The government has done this in partnership with a charitable trust. The project works via low decile schools to help families in greatest need to use the Internet, e-mail and basic computer skills in their daily lives to enhance their performance at school and at work.

Training for parents is provided at their children's school and this must be completed before the computer is taken home to the family. Government funding is matched by community support to ensure that the project is self-sustaining.

An independent review showed that the Computers in Homes intervention was deemed to be highly effective. There was high usage of the computers by families, with benefits to both the child and the family, and the computers became important to the families.

Investment in communities is also an important part of the government’s National Digital Strategy through the Community Partnership Fund, which is now the prime funder of Computers in Homes. More information about this programme can be seen on the Digital Strategy website, here.

Although I have emphasised the role of ICTs in enabling teaching and learning across the whole curriculum, ICTs are also a part of the school curriculum. Since the mid 1990s Technology has been specified as one of the essential learning areas of the New Zealand national curriculum and is compulsory for all students up to the end of year 10. This curriculum area focuses on the development of students’ technological knowledge and practice across a wide range of traditional and modern technologies, including electronics and control, structures, materials, biotechnology, food technology and ICTs. In the senior secondary years (years 11-13) students can choose to continue a broad-based technology programme or they can take more specialised courses. There are a wide range of Technology standards on the National Qualifications Framework which teachers can select for assessment of students towards a general or specialist National Certificate.

In Conclusion:

New Zealand is trying to ensure that our school system transforms us into a knowledge society. We see the use of ICTs as fundamental to this.

Some practical ICT initiatives we have developed in recent years have been the provision of laptops for teachers. All school principals were given a free laptop and classroom teachers have the opportunity to lease for a very modest amount a laptop on a three-year programme. Take-up among classroom teachers has been high. A review of the programme has shown that it has been very successful in promoting ICT use by teachers.

Another successful ICT initiative has been the use of clusters for professional development. These have been particularly successful in enabling teachers to share good curriculum teaching and learning practice which involves the effective use of ICTs.

Other developments include online professional development and professional networking for all principals, extending broadband coverage to all schools, prioritising ICT support to low income schools and rural schools, and the development of a nationwide e-admin network for all schools including an online student information service (ENROL) completed in 2007.

In a knowledge society, everyone needs the thinking, skills and knowledge once reserved for the high-achieving students. Learners will not be able to thrive on “one shot” of education that will serve them for life.

They will need to gain the skills for life-long learning. They will need to problem-solve, be self-motivated, work with others, create, and innovate. Above all they will need to be able to communicate effectively and use all the information and communication technologies available to them.

In New Zealand we see this as an important part of our vision for education in the 21st century.

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