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Education Minister Hekia Parata says New Zealand’s approach to Maori education sparked the interest of overseas experts during the weekend’s International Education Summit on the teaching profession at parliament.
New Zealand hosted delegations from the top 20 education systems as determined by PISA rankings, as well as education ministers from several Pacific Island countries.
Ms Parata says the idea of offering immersion education in indigenous languages was new to many of the ministers.
She says it was a welcome reminder of New Zealand’s achievements despite the distance there is still to go to raise outcomes for Maori.
" We actually have done some very special and important things in our education system and I as minister of education needs to work even harder to support those initiatives around Maori immersion education and around Maori operating in the mainstream, so that our young people are getting the best quality teaching and that their identity, language and culture are a normal part of that context. " she says.
Hekia Parata says some of the ministers visited kohanga and kura and are keen to talk more about how they might adapt such strategies to their own countries.
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