The Ministry of Education doesn’t endorse it. Education Minister Chris Hipkins is also against it. Now, teachers’ unions are joining forces to call for streaming in schools to be abolished.
At its annual conference in Wellington, the Post-Primary Teachers’ Association (PPTA) will lay out why it thinks streaming should end – and why its members should introduce a new policy asking for it to end by 2030.
“Taking a stand against educationally harmful practices – whether it’s corporal punishment, charter schools, salaries, bulk funding, or antiquated qualifications systems – is one of PPTA Te Wehengarua’s greatest strengths,” PPTA president Melanie Webber said in her opening address on Tuesday.
In the paper that will be presented to the conference on Wednesday, the union pointed to a growing body of research showing that grouping students by academic ability did more harm than good.
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Webber cited evidence which showed “how educationally harmful [streaming] is for Māori and Pasifika ākonga (students)”.
The paper will be presented to about 150 PPTA delegates representing 20,000 secondary teachers urging them to adopt the policy calling for an end to streaming.
The New Zealand Educational Institute (NZEI) also had streaming on the agenda at its conference in Rotorua earlier this week.
Albany Senior High School English teacher Philippa Wintle has worked in education for 15 years, and said any system where Māori and Pasifika students were at the bottom was “by design, inherently racist”.
“The thing with streamed classes, and I’m talking about the low-band classes, is that students see other students who look like them and alongside that is the feeling that they’re in the dumb class,” she said.
Wintle has spent a lot of her career teaching students in ‘lower band’ classes, and said young people’s perspectives of themselves were influenced by the classes they found themselves and “that’s where that cycle of internalised racism begins to perpetuate”, she said.
“Any system where students who predominantly Māori and Pacific are over-represented in negative statistics has got to be a system that by design favours non-Māori and non-Pacific students.”
If the PPTA voted to introduce a policy to end streaming, it would be a “big milestone” according to Piripi Prendergast, a project manager at Christchurch based think-tank Tokono Te Raki Māori Futures Collective.
Prendergast said there was a wealth of research that showed steaming in schools was detrimental to a young person’s education, and had the power to negatively impact students’ mindset.
“It is really damaging because you have the underlying unconscious bias with teacher perceptions so more Māori and Pasifika end up in the bottom classes,” Prendergast said.
“It’s a mental health issue, because early on you are being told that you are dumb. That self-confidence and self belief is damaged, and that carries through.”
Hipkins has said he believed streaming created “inequitable outcomes among learners” and wanted schools to move away from it as it was inconsistent with the Government’s Statement of National Education and Learning Priorities – released in November 2020 – which focused on reducing barriers to education and ensuring schools had “high aspirations” for every learner.
“Streaming students into classes where lower overall expectations are set for some groups of learners isn’t acceptable practice,” Hipkins said.
Tipene Chrisp, manager of the Ministry of Education’s policy unit, said the agency didn’t support streaming and recommended schools move towards inclusive and equitable learning environments.
“The evidence shows that streaming can limit learner aspirations and engagement, create low expectations and self-fulfilling cycles of lower academic achievement,” Chrisp said. “This contributes to inequitable outcomes, especially for Māori, Pacific and disabled learners who are disproportionally placed in lower streams.”
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