Our recommendations

We recommend that the Ministry of Education:

1. work with schools and other education organisations to identify what information it needs to develop a better picture of student achievement and progress and what factors can lead to inequity in educational outcomes;
2. work with schools and other education organisations to develop a plan to collect and share the information it identifies in response to Recommendation 1, including who will collect it, how often they will collect it, how it will be used, and who it will be shared with;
3. regularly analyse the information available about student achievement and progress alongside research about the factors influencing educational outcomes to develop more detailed knowledge of:
   • the specific student groups who are not meeting achievement or progress expectations;
   • how factors that influence achievement and progress interact and affect those specific student groups; and
   • the factors that the Ministry and schools can directly influence and those that need a broader response;
4. implement a more structured approach to evaluating its strategies, programmes, and initiatives that sets out what is evaluated and why, how evaluations are organised and resourced, and how results will be shared within the Ministry and with education organisations and the public; and
5. regularly bring together information from evaluations of the Ministry's initiatives with assessments of research on improving achievement and addressing inequity, and use the results to inform refinements to the design, targeting, and prioritisation of initiatives aimed at addressing inequity.