What New Zealand Can Teach Us About Education

Like many states in the US, New Zealand’s government has embraced the “science of reading.” But it hasn’t stopped there.

Photo by Dan Freeman on Unsplash

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The other day I was on an email chain with two other US-based author/speakers who focus on connecting cognitive science and education (they were my two co-hosts for Season 3 of the Knowledge Matters Podcast). One mentioned he would be in New Zealand in January. I wrote back that I was in New Zealand now—what a coincidence! The other then wrote that he would be in New Zealand in a couple of weeks.

Why are so many of us flocking to New Zealand—which isn’t exactly a hop, skip, and a jump from the United States? Basically, because as far as I know, New Zealand currently has the only national government in the English-speaking world that has enthusiastically endorsed the idea that curriculum and instruction should be aligned with the findings of cognitive science.¹ [Update, September 7, 2025: Since this post was first published, I’ve been alerted to some promising developments in Northern Ireland, which has undertaken an effort similar to New Zealand’s. See here, here, and here for government newsletters with more information.]

I was invited to New Zealand to speak at a conference organized by a nongovernmental organization that helps schools implement “structured literacy.” Decades ago, along with some other English-speaking countries—including the US, England, Australia, and Canada—New Zealand embraced the “whole language” approach to teaching reading. Beginning in the 1990s, that segued into the “balanced literacy” approach, in which most of today’s reading teachers in those countries were trained.

Both approaches share an aversion to systematic phonics instruction and encourage children to guess at words rather than sound them out. That aversion may be even more deeply rooted in New Zealand than in the other countries where these approaches to literacy instruction have been dominant. Marie Clay, a leading light of the whole-language movement whose ideas became highly influential in the US, was a Kiwi.

“Structured literacy” is the term some have adopted to refer to an approach that, in contrast to balanced literacy, grounds reading instruction in evidence from cognitive science that supports systematic instruction in phonics.² As in the US, the primary emphasis of reading reform in New Zealand so far has been on that aspect of reading instruction. But unlike most of the discussion in the US, the conversation among high-level policymakers has expanded to include the evidence from cognitive science related to reading comprehension.

Building Knowledge

That evidence indicates that the key factor in comprehension is knowledge: background knowledge relating to the topic of a particular text—and, for general reading comprehension, general knowledge of the world and general familiarity with the complex syntax of written language. But in New Zealand and other balanced literacy strongholds, instruction has focused instead on supposedly abstract comprehension skills like finding the main idea of a text or making inferences about the meanings of words.

As a result, the education systems in these countries have generally failed to recognize the importance of systematically building children’s academic knowledge and vocabulary, beginning in the early elementary grades. The effect has been to exacerbate existing inequities, since students from higher socioeconomic groups are better able to pick up that kind of knowledge and vocabulary at home.

In the last few years, most state governments in the US have adopted policies aimed at bringing phonics instruction in line with cognitive science. At the same time, all but a handful have overlooked the need to do the same with comprehension instruction. As for the US federal government, it has no direct control over curriculum and instruction, and in recent years it hasn’t even tried to influence reading instruction indirectly.

In New Zealand, as in most countries, the national government has much more control over education, including the ability to promulgate a national curriculum. Last year, the Minister of Education, Erica Stanford, issued a statement outlining six education “priorities.” The second priority relates to evidence-based instruction in “early literacy” (along with math), which is usually interpreted as meaning foundational skills like phonics. But the first priority is “establishing a knowledge-rich curriculum grounded in the science of learning.” And the first sentence of New Zealand’s newly revised English curriculum declares, “The New Zealand curriculum is knowledge-rich.”

That’s enough to warm the heart of anyone who has been laboring to get policymakers in the US to recognize the need to adopt science-informed teaching practices that extend beyond phonics. No wonder we’re all eager to make the trip to New Zealand to do what we can to help.

Still a Work in Progress

Of course, setting priorities is one thing and changing curriculum and instruction is another. And New Zealand’s reforms are still very much a work in progress. As it stands now, the New Zealand English curriculum isn’t actually “knowledge-rich.” Like state literacy standards in the US, it’s essentially a list of skills.

They’re not necessarily the same skills you would find in the US. Instead of things like “finding the main idea,” the New Zealand curriculum focuses on enabling students to do things like “use a growing vocabulary to describe their thoughts and feelings about their learning and experiences.” But the curriculum doesn’t say anything about what they’re supposed to be learning. That could lead teachers to continue to teach comprehension skills in the abstract rather than doing so in the service of building knowledge.

I’m told that content-specific science and social studies curricula are being developed. I hope that when they arrive, New Zealand educators will recognize that rather than teaching students how to, for instance, “use a growing vocabulary” in the abstract, or only in relation to English literature, objectives like that should be woven throughout the curriculum.

It’s also worth noting that in countries like New Zealand and England, the word “curriculum” doesn’t mean the same thing it does in the US. When it does specify content, the New Zealand curriculum will be more like state social studies and science standards in the US, generally outlining topics to be covered. It won’t provide the kind of detailed lesson plans you would find in a published curriculum in the US.

That places a heavy burden on teachers, who need to conserve their time and energy for delivering a curriculum in the way that is most effective for their particular students. Ideally, other entities will create detailed instructional materials aligned to the New Zealand curriculum and to teaching methods grounded in cognitive science—if not publishers, then other kinds of organizations. That seems to be happening in Australia, where a nonprofit organization called Ochre is disseminating science-informed instructional materials, for free.

Fundamentally changing an education system is a long-term process, and inevitably there will be bumps along the way. Educators in New Zealand have told me, for example, that they’re now required to spend an hour each on reading, math, and writing, and that any writing done during the times for other subjects doesn’t count toward the one hour to be allotted to writing. It’s terrific to see a strong emphasis on writing instruction, but that kind of separation seems like a misstep. Students do need explicit, separate instruction in foundational writing skills like letter formation, but after that it works best to weave writing instruction—like reading comprehension instruction—into the curriculum across subject areas.

But overall, what’s going on in New Zealand looks extremely promising, even if administrators and teachers will inevitably confront challenges in implementing the new directives. Policymakers are saying all the right things, which is an important first step—and one that desperately needs follow-through.

Politics could threaten that follow-through. The current New Zealand government is considered right-of-center (although I don’t know where its policies would fall on the US political spectrum), and some see its efforts to bring curriculum and instruction in line with scientific evidence as politically conservative. That could lead to a change of course if the next election brings in a left-leaning government.

That would be a tragedy. Deciding what content to teach is inherently political, to some extent—and for the sake of children, adults will need to make compromises. What shouldn’t be political is aligning education to what the evidence tells us is most likely to work. Regardless of their political affiliation, government officials and policymakers need to recognize that science-informed teaching benefits all students, and especially the most vulnerable.

1. England used to have such a government, under the Conservative Party, but it’s been replaced by the Labour Party, which doesn’t seem to have the same commitment. Still, there seems to be enough grassroots enthusiasm for cognitive science among educators in England that the shift could survive a change in government policy.

2. In the US, the more frequently used term is the “science of reading,” but “structured literacy” makes more sense. The “science of reading” simply refers to a body of evidence—which, like any body of evidence, could change—whereas “structured literacy” refers to an approach grounded in the evidence as it currently exists.