Here’s ten minutes of viewing that I think every New Zealand educator, principal, and policymaker should make time for.
Farida Shaheed, the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to education, recently presented her latest report to the Human Rights Council in Geneva. The report’s focus is curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment and it precisely names the tension we’re living through here in Aotearoa right now, just from the opposite direction.
Shaheed’s argument starts by stating simply that curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment aren’t separate technical choices. Curriculum determines which knowledge, histories, languages, and values are recognised and promoted, while pedagogy determines whether learners experience education through participation or obedience, trust or surveillance, cooperation or competition. And assessment? It determines what is rewarded, what’s ignored, who is allowed to progress, and who is left behind. Three levers, one system – and they need to be aligned with each other and with what we actually say education is for.
That’s where it gets pointed. Education is rarely measured against its internationally recognised aims; instead, learning is commonly judged through narrow performance indicators, exam results, and international rankings. The result is predictable: what can be easily measured becomes dominant, displacing what is vital to human development but difficult to quantify – creativity, empathy, ethical judgment, cultural understanding.
This is precisely the territory I’ve been circling in recent posts on the Taylorist drift in our current policy settings – structured literacy mandates, direct instruction, a heavier reliance on exam-based assessment. Shaheed gives that drift a sharper edge, arguing that when assessment is used primarily for ranking and selection, it can intensify social inequalities, undermine motivation, and push learners – especially those affected by poverty, disability, displacement, language barriers, or interrupted schooling – to disengage and exit education altogether, often through no fault of their own ability, but because the system offers too little flexibility or recovery.
Her call to action is the line I think NZ’s leaders should consider. It involves a shift from rating performance to supporting learning – meaning less dependence on high-stakes standardised testing, more formative assessment, portfolios, and project – and peer-based approaches that recognise progress and reward a wider range of competencies. And crucially, she pairs this with a defence of teacher professionalism. Shaheed argues that teachers should be able to exercise professional judgment and adapt teaching to learners’ needs, which isn’t possible when they’re constrained by rigid curricula, excessive testing tied to funding, or poor working conditions.
Then the report does something I love – it hands the microphone to the people the system is actually for. Drawing on interviews with more than 300 children and young people, Shaheed shares testimony from the young people interviewed that reinforces how important it is that these voices are taken notice of as we look to design education into the future. One young person she interviewed put it this way: “we spend years memorising answers but very little time learning how to think, question, create, or solve problems – we are trained to pass tests, not to understand the world around us”. Another asked for an education that prepares young people not only to pass exams but to live with dignity, think critically, and contribute meaningfully to their communities – and reminded us that relevance is not the same as immediate economic utility.
One student contribution captured something I haven’t heard said this plainly in any policy document. The student said that school has taught real strength and opened doors, but that the weight of those doors, the pressure of grades and exams, often crowds out care; that students carry more into class than books, including the quiet fear of falling behind that nobody grades. Read in full, in the addendum to her report, it’s a gut-punch – and exactly the kind of evidence base our system-level conversations are too often missing.
Here’s why I’m sharing this so directly with my network. We are, right now, swinging hard towards exactly the model Shaheed is asking the world to move away from – more standardisation, more high-stakes testing, more curriculum prescription, less room for teacher judgment. I don’t think anyone driving that swing intends harm. But intentions don’t change outcomes, and Shaheed’s report is about as clear a statement as you’ll find of what the evidence – and the young people living inside these systems – are telling us about where that road leads.
If you only have ten minutes this week, spend them watching this. Then ask yourself the question I’m asking myself: what would it take for “from rating performance to supporting learning” to become our guiding mantra, rather than the road not taken?
