The latest Pisa report looks at how a countries educational system performs against how much that country invests. Not surprisingly and as usual NZ comes out as one of the top performers. The report shows that it is vital that a country uses its educational resources well as opposed to just throwing money at the system.
You can read the 4 page report here.
In terms of investing in its children NZ sits alongside countries such as Estonia, Greece, Israel, Hungary and Thailand. Countries which we are now tending to follow in terms of policy, the US, Australia and UK, spends considerably more per student than NZ. Yet we comfortably outperform them with our current system.
NZ spends around $43,000 per student across the years between 6-15 which equates to an annual spend of $4,300 US per child per year. In comparison the US spends $10,800 per student, the UK $8,500 per student and Australia $7,200. Our closest neighbours Australia are funding per pupil 60% more than NZ.
The report shows that, among high-income economies, the amount spent on education is less important than how those resources are used, in particular getting the right people to work with children and investing in them heavily. Worrying for NZ classrooms is the PISA statement that small class sizes does not influence achievement outcomes - recently presented by Treasury. While I would acknowledge that the evidence seems to support this - small class sizes do not improve educational outcomes - what they do make is a huge difference to the confidence of education. People (kids, teachers, parents) feel better if class sizes are reasonable, and if the class sizes have to be big that there is quality spaces to work in.
Again NZ performs extremely well on the best test of all and that is in comparison to the OECD countries.
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