The Initial Teacher Education (ITE) Programme Requirements are being reviewed following the transfer of responsibility from the Teaching Council of Aotearoa New Zealand to the Ministry of Education and the introduction of the 2026 Standards for the Teaching Profession. The Ministry of Education (the Ministry) contracted MartinJenkins to review the ITE Programme Requirements in this context, with dandolopartners (dandolo) subcontracted by MartinJenkins to support this review. MartinJenkins and dandolo have jointly prepared the full discussion document and this summary. 

This document summarises the full discussion document prepared as part of that review, which considers whether the current requirements remain fit for purpose and continue to support high-quality teacher preparation. This summary is intended to support discussion and feedback on the main issues, assumptions and opportunities identified in the full discussion document.

ITE programmes provide the foundational training required for individuals to become qualified and registered teachers in early childhood education, schools and kura across Aotearoa New Zealand. The ITE Programme Requirements establish the expectations that all ITE programmes must meet in relation to programme design, delivery, assessment and quality assurance. 

The discussion document argues that while current ITE programmes have many strengths, there is a growing need for greater consistency in how teachers are prepared. Beginning teachers need to enter the profession with the knowledge, practices and capabilities to support all learners, including Māori, Pasifika, disabled learners, and those with diverse learning needs. At the same time, providers need flexibility to design programmes that reflect their own context and strengths. 

This summary outlines:

• Why the requirements should be reviewed now 
• The principles used to guide the review
• Opportunities for improving the ITE Programme Requirements

Why the requirements should be reviewed now

To assess whether the current ITE Programme Requirements remain fit for purpose, the review considered how well they support consistent, high-quality teacher preparation across providers and pathways. Drawing on desktop research, stakeholder interviews, literature and international evidence, and advice from an expert advisory panel, the review identified four interrelated reasons for reviewing and strengthening the ITE Programme Requirements. 

1. Improving teacher preparedness to contribute to improving student outcomes. Inequity in student outcomes remains a persistent challenge in Aotearoa New Zealand, particularly in literacy and numeracy. The quality of teaching is a critical in-system influence on learner outcomes, and ITE plays a crucial role in establishing the knowledge teachers need to contribute to this. 
2. Addressing inconsistencies in beginning teacher preparedness. Recent evidence indicates that a significant proportion of new teachers enter the profession feeling underprepared. Variation depending on where they studied suggests that the ITE Programme Requirements may not provide a sufficiently clear and shared foundation for graduate readiness across providers. 
3. Ensuring all student teachers benefit from the stronger evidence base about effective teaching. There is now greater clarity about the knowledge, practices and capabilities that support learning and development across early learning, schools and kura, providing the impetus for a stronger foundation across providers to ensure that all student teachers engage with the evidence available about effective teaching. 
4. Responding consistently to wider education reforms. Changes to curriculum and child safety obligations are reshaping what is expected of beginning teachers and the environments graduates will enter. The ITE Programme Requirements have an important role in keeping programmes aligned with these reforms and ensure a consistent understanding of how those expectations should be reflected in teacher preparation. 

The principles used to guide the review

The review is guided by five key principles:

• Aligning with contemporary evidence about effective teaching. The ITE Programme Requirements should reflect contemporary evidence about effective teaching and professional knowledge regarding what beginning teachers should know and do, while recognising that evidence should be understood broadly and appropriately.
• Responding to the Aotearoa New Zealand context with a genuine commitment to te ao Māori. The ITE Programme Requirements should establish clear expectations that all graduates demonstrate capability to honour Te Tiriti o Waitangi in practice, engage authentically with te ao Māori, and contribute to educational success for Māori as Māori.
• Ensuring ITE recognises the diversity of learners. The ITE Programme Requirements should ensure beginning teachers are prepared to work effectively with learners who bring different identities, languages, cultures, experiences, abilities and learning needs.
• Balancing programme consistency with contextualisation. The ITE Programme Requirements should provide greater clarity about the core capabilities expected of all graduates while preserving flexibility for providers to design programmes that respond to their contexts, learners and partnerships.
• Applying good regulatory practice. The ITE Programme Requirements should reflect good regulatory practice by providing clear and consistent expectations, remaining proportionate to the risks being managed and focusing on areas where regulation can most effectively contribute to improved outcomes.

Opportunities for improving the ITE Programme Requirements 

The paper identifies nine opportunities to strengthen the clarity, consistency and assurance provided by the ITE Programme Requirements while preserving flexibility for providers. The opportunities are focused on improvement across programme design, programme content and quality assurance. Each opportunity describes the current settings, the opportunity to strengthen them and the types of changes that may be needed to realise that opportunity. 

The opportunities are intended to support discussion and feedback about how ITE could better prepare future teachers. These are not final recommendations, proposed amendments or draft ITE Programme Requirements. No decisions have been made about where any opportunities should be progressed. The opportunities do not represent Government policy, or a position of the Ministry.

Improving programme design

1. Clarify what counts as evidence, and how it should inform programme design

The current requirements expect programmes to be "evidence-informed", but there is no shared understanding of what this means, nor do they distinguish between evidence about effective teaching and the less settled evidence regarding specific ITE programme models. This creates scope for providers to interpret and apply the expectation in different ways. 

The paper proposes strengthening how ‘evidence-informed’ is defined and positioned in the ITE Programme Requirements and establishing clearer expectations about the evidence that should inform programme design and teaching content. 

The intention is to ensure all student teachers engage with robust research and evidence about effective teaching. Evidence would be understood broadly, including mātauranga Māori, kaupapa Māori evidence, Māori education research and professional expertise. This would create a stronger link between programme design, what is taught, and graduate readiness. 

2. Reframe staff capability away from research production 

Current requirements place a strong emphasis on research activity as evidence of staff capability. This treats research production as a key marker of staff capability, which may not reflect the applied purpose of ITE or the diversity of the provider landscape and can create disproportionate burden for non-university providers. 

The paper suggests shifting the focus towards professional expertise, practice knowledge and engagement with evidence and removing research production as the default way of demonstrating capability. This recognises that preparing effective teachers requires a combination of current teaching knowledge, professional learning and connections to practice, not just research production. 

Providers could continue to demonstrate capability through research activity where appropriate, but research wouldn’t be required as the only or universal route. This would better align the ITE Programme Requirements with the applied purpose of ITE and the diversity of the provider landscape. 

3. Require programmes to articulate a coherent and complete model of progression 

The current requirements expect ITE providers to demonstrate how different parts of their programme connect, including through a conceptual framework outlining the beliefs and values underpinning the programme, as well as its learning outcomes, programme structure and assessment framework. 

The paper proposes requiring providers to go further and articulate a model of progression that clearly explains how the student journey is deliberately designed to build teaching capability over time, from entry through to graduation. This model would complement, rather than replace, the existing conceptual framework.

In this model, the student journey would become the organising principle for programme design. Providers would be required to show how curriculum, pedagogy, professional experience, partnerships and assessment work together to support student teachers’ progression towards the Standards for the Teaching Profession and readiness for professional practice. 

The goal is to strengthen programme coherence while allowing flexibility for providers to develop progression models that reflect their programme structure, qualification type, student teacher characteristics and context.  

Improving programme content

4. Retain current student entry requirements but improve consistency in how they are assessed 

Recent changes have strengthened entry requirements, including the introduction of a common national numeracy assessment for English-medium primary programmes. However, the literacy assessment remains largely provider led, which can require applicants to complete multiple tests and limits assurance that candidates are being assessed against comparable thresholds. 

The paper does not identify a need to change the current entry standards for ITE. Instead, it proposes making the way those standards are assessed more consistent across providers. For example, a common literacy assessment could reduce duplication, improve comparability, and strengthen confidence that applicants are being assessed against the same expectations. 

This would align the literacy assessment with the existing national approach for numeracy and provide comparable assurance across providers. This would complement, rather than replace, existing requirements that are not captured by LNAAT and sit outside of literacy and numeracy. In particular, providers would continue to assess an applicant’s proficiency in te reo Māori upon entry. 

5. Introduce greater specificity regarding required content aligned with the 2026 Standards for the Teaching Profession 

Under the current Requirements, providers have considerable discretion in interpreting the Standards for the Teaching Profession and determining what student teachers must learn to meet them in a supported environment. While this supports diversity in programme design, it can lead to inconsistent interpretations of the essential knowledge and practices that all student teachers should develop before entering the profession.

One of the most significant proposals in the paper is the development of a "shared core" of knowledge, practices and capabilities that all student teachers should learn before entering the profession. This strengthens the current arrangements, which give providers significant discretion to determine what students must learn to meet the Standards for the Teaching Profession.

This shared core would be aligned with the 2026 Standards for the Teaching Profession and would identify the essential knowledge and practices expected of beginning teachers. It would include common elements for all programmes and specific elements for early childhood, schooling and kura contexts, drawing on the strongest available evidence, mātauranga Māori and professional consensus. It wouldn’t cover everything a student teacher should learn, but would provide explicit direction in areas where there is clear and established evidence or consensus about the knowledge and practices required for quality teaching. 

Providers would be required to incorporate the shared core into their programmes, while retaining responsibility for programme design, contextualisation, partnerships and professional experience models. This would establish a clearer common foundation for graduate readiness while preserving flexibility in how providers teach, sequence and contextualise the required content.

6. Embed clearer expectations for high-quality professional experience 

Professional experience placements are widely recognised as one of the most important parts of teacher preparation. The current ITE Programme Requirements rely heavily on providers to interpret and implement the conditions that make professional experience high quality, which can contribute to variable placement experiences. 

The paper proposes clearer expectations for what high-quality professional experience looks like, including better preparation and support for associate teachers, more structured opportunities for active teaching aligned to the model of progression, stronger communication between providers and placement settings, and a focus on quality rather than simply the number of placement days completed. Clearer expectations would also clarify the shared responsibilities of providers, schools, kura, early learning services and associate teachers. 

The changes would distinguish between common quality expectations and pathway-specific design features, recognising that different programme structures, including employment-based pathways, may require different approaches. 

The paper also recognises that many factors affecting the availability and quality of professional experience sit outside the ITE Programme Requirements and require complementary system-level action.

7. Consider a national, standardised and externally moderated assessment framework 

The current assessment architecture outlined in the ITE Programme Requirements relies heavily on provider-led judgements and does not align these judgements to a sufficiently explicit external standard. This limits independent assurance that graduates from different providers have met a consistent national threshold for readiness to teach. 

The paper proposes retaining provider-led assessment while introducing a national assessment framework that provides stronger external assurance of student teacher capability. The framework could assess core knowledge, professional judgement and application, and observed teaching practice, supported by clear external standards and robust moderation from independent assessors.

The assessment framework would be guided by a set of principles to ensure that it strengthens confidence in graduate readiness while supporting assessment that is authentic, fair, and fit for purpose. It would support reliable and comparable judgements across providers, while allowing flexibility in how assessments are sequenced and embedded within different programme models.

8. Establish clearer links between ITE preparation and supports for early career teachers 

At present, the ITE Programme Requirements and the supports available to beginning teachers, such as induction and mentoring, operate largely as separate systems. The transition of a student teacher from an ITE programme to employment in a school or early learning setting is a critical stage of teacher development. The current ITE Programme Requirements include a recommendation that graduates be provided with information to inform their induction and mentoring but stop short of establishing a formal connection between programme design and early career support. 

The paper proposes that ITE programmes more explicitly prepare graduates for the transition into beginning teacher roles. This would include helping student teachers understand induction and mentoring, progression to full certification and strategies for continued professional growth, while making clearer connections between the capabilities developed during ITE and those reinforced through early career support.

This would position ITE as the first stage of a more coherent professional learning journey, rather than a discrete phase that ends at graduation. It would not extend the ITE Programme Requirements into employment or transfer responsibility for ongoing support away from employers and the wider system.

Improving programme quality assurance

9. Strengthen the rigour and consistency of programme approvals, monitoring and moderation 

Programme approvals, monitoring and national moderation are the three principal mechanisms through which the Teaching Council of Aotearoa New Zealand provides independent oversight of ITE programme quality. However, variation in approval panel composition, monitor selection and moderation arrangements can limit the rigour, consistency and transparency of quality-assurance judgements across programmes.

The paper proposes strengthening these mechanisms through standing national approval panels, a trained pool of panellists and monitors, independent appointment of monitors, and a shared monitoring framework focused on programme delivery and the development of graduate capability. It also proposes clearer links between monitoring findings and required action, and a more coherent national moderation arrangement.

Together, these changes would provide stronger assurance that programmes are designed and delivered to a consistently high standard and that approval, monitoring and moderation decisions are based on explicit and transparent expectations. They would also support oversight of any new shared core and help ensure new requirements are implemented with sufficient depth, coherence and rigour.

Changes would need to build on the strengths of existing quality-assurance processes, complement the roles of the Ministry, Teaching Council of Aotearoa New Zealand and tertiary quality-assurance bodies, and avoid unnecessary duplication or compliance burden for providers. Māori-medium programmes would continue to require an appropriately contextualised approval pathway supported by Māori-medium expertise.

Looking ahead

Taken together, the nine opportunities represent a shift toward a more coherent and consistent approach to teacher preparation in Aotearoa New Zealand. The overall direction is to provide greater clarity about what all beginning teachers should know and be able to do, while preserving flexibility for providers to reflect their own contexts and approaches.

The discussion document does not propose a single model of teacher education. Instead, it seeks feedback on whether a stronger shared foundation, clearer expectations, and more robust quality assurance could improve confidence that all graduates are ready to support learner success from the start of their teaching careers. 

How can I provide feedback? 

We encourage anyone with an interest in Initial Teacher Education, teaching and learning, or the future teacher workforce to share their views. 

The engagement period for the ITE Programme Requirements Review runs from 2 October to 13 November 2026. Please provide your feedback by 13 November 2026.

You can provide feedback by:

• Completing a short online survey (around 15 minutes) under Have Your Say on the ITE Programme Requirements Review webpage: https://www.education.govt.nz/have-your-say/have-your-say-review-initial-teacher-education-programme-requirements/details or: https://www.education.govt.nz/ite-review. 
• Using the same online survey to make a written submission of any length. 
• Emailing your feedback or submission to [email protected]. 
• Providing your feedback in an alternative format, including New Zealand Sign Language (NZSL), audio, video, or another accessible format, by contacting [email protected].  

For more information about the review, including supporting documents and accessible formats, visit the ITE Programme Requirements Review webpage: https://www.education.govt.nz/have-your-say/have-your-say-review-initial-teacher-education-programme-requirements/details or: https://www.education.govt.nz/ite-review.

Speaker: Joe Connell

Tenako Tokato Ko Joe Connell Toku Inoa E Tipu A.K.O. E Te Fangarui Atara E O Teporti E Fangarui Hoki E Timata Takumahi E Te Kawanatanga O Ateroa Inane Ke Puripi.

Hello everyone. Lovely to meet you. My name is Joe Connell. I am proud to be from Aotearoa, New Zealand. I grew up in Wellington, Dunedin, and Whanganui.

And I began my career in New Zealand government. These days, I work and live on Wurundjeri country in Melbourne, Australia, but I strongly identify with New Zealand, and it is a privilege to have my firm, Dandelight Partners, partnering with Martin Jenkins in New Zealand to contribute to this.

important work, a review of initial teacher education programme requirements for the Ministry of Education in Aotearoa New Zealand. This is a short recording intended to provide an overview of the thinking that we've done so far in the process that we're running and a key part of it.

is to invite you to provide feedback and your perspectives through the engagement process that we're running. What I'm going to do today is I'm going to talk a bit about the context and trigger for this review. I'm going to talk about the principles that we use to move from that contextual understanding to some ideas for consideration.

And then I'm going to talk about those ideas, they're what we call opportunities from programme. I'll finish up by talking about next steps, the ways that you can engage with this project further.

The wider context for this review is broader education reforms in Aotearoa New Zealand. Of course, we all share aspirations for our education system to strengthen, embolden, empower students in Aotearoa New Zealand for the world that they are going to face as they move through and beyond our formal education system. And we acknowledge that there's a lot going on in education reform in New Zealand with assessment in Aramatawai. There is a renewed focus on expectations around child safety. Of course, there's a new knowledge-rich curriculum.

There's a focus overall on raising student achievement. And within all of that, the ministry has led a process to revise and now to implement new 2026 standards for the teaching profession. These are the formal requirements or standards.

for what we expect of teachers as professionals in New Zealand. And I deliberately finish on that point because there's a key link between that and what's happening in initial teacher education reform. Those standards sit above the initial teacher education requirements.

So the standards describe what we expect for the profession as a whole. The initial teacher education requirements describe how we expect IT providers to prepare students to graduate and then to go on and demonstrate those standards in a supervised environment.

What we'd say is that the change in those standards necessarily then requires us to think about changing the ITE requirements. That is always going to be the case when those sorts of material changes are made. But there's an additional contextual piece that we want to bring into the conversation as well.

At the moment, under those requirements, a lot of discretion, autonomy, choice is given to individual IT providers as to how they take those professional standards and how they fulfil their obligations under the requirements to produce high quality graduates.

This flexibility has some real strengths. It supports diversity and programme design. We've got 29 different IT providers in Aotearoa. They're all different. They all do things slightly differently, and there are some really good things about that. But there are some limitations around it as well. It doesn't provide a common expectation.

of how ITE students should go through that programme and how we can ensure that they're then prepared to effectively transition into the early careers that we hope ITE will prepare them for. So that's the kind of core logic that we have in terms of trigger for the review. This also happens in the wider context of drivers of change.

The first of these, as I've mentioned earlier, and always the North Star in this kind of education reform, is the idea of wanting to address persistent challenges in inequity and student outcomes and literacy and numeracy and attendance and all the things that we as an education system as a whole want to push forward.

The second thing is that in the last 20 or 30 years, our knowledge, our evidence base about what effective teaching does and doesn't look like has actually strengthened a lot, relying on cognitive science, relying on really high quality academic research.

and research that specifically contextualised for a New Zealand Aotearoa context. We actually know what effective teaching practise looks like. We want to leverage that new knowledge to support the best possible pathway through ITE and into careers. The third point here is around graduate preparedness. There's been several pieces of research recently the OECD and Telus, the Education Review Office in New Zealand, that have raised concerns about the quality and the consistency of graduates coming out of New Zealand IT providers. And there's also been some reasonable critiques of the methodology used around those studies. So we would say this is a question that we are holding and investigating through this engagement process.

How consistent are we finding the graduates that come out of ITE? And are they well prepared to jump into our New Zealand education system and start delivering outcomes for kids and communities? And finally, to draw us back to the previous slide, this sort of thing essentially happens in the context of
wider system reform, and where there are important agendas and ideas that we want to pursue in terms of system reform, IT requirements can contribute to that as well. So how do we move between that trigger, that understanding of context, and some ideas as to what we might actually do in terms of IT reform in New Zealand? 

Well... We took a principles-led, principles-based approach to doing that. We thought, if we want to address that context, what are the things that we want to be applying as we do that? The first is we want to align with contemporary evidence about effective teaching. So all of that knowledge that's developed in the past 20 or 30 years all of that clarity, that coherence, that consistency about, for example, what it means to teach early literacy well, or what we know about cognitive science. We want to absorb that and think about how that plays out in an ITE context. But picking up on the second principle here, we also want to think about how we do that.

in an Aotearoa New Zealand context specifically. There's no scenario in which we would suggest a kind of lift and shift or cookie cutter approach here. We really need to contextualise for New Zealand's education system the needs of New Zealand communities, including with a genuine commitment to Te Ao Maori. Our perspective here is to deliberately use the term tell Maori to encapsulate an idea of culture, language, identity, worldview that includes but is not limited to the Maori-Crown relationship through Te Tiriti. And you'll see us carrying those ideas through in our discussion document and some of the comments that I make today. The third thing is we want to ensure that IT recognises the diversity of learners.

So while there is a strong evidence base about what good quality teaching practise looks like, we also know that teaching needs to be differentiated, deal differently with students from different backgrounds in certain contexts to be inclusive, to meet students where they are.

The next principle I think really gets to the heart of the challenge that we're navigating through in this process, which is that we want to balance programme consistency with contextualization or discretion. At the moment in the status quo in New Zealand, we would say that we've leaned highly into allowing individual providers to make a lot of choices.

And that has some benefits, as I've mentioned before, in terms of contextualization. But our sense is that we need a bit of a rebalance, that in some areas we actually need to drive some consistency so that we have some certainty and some knowledge about what it looks like for someone to come out of ITE in New Zealand and step into one of our schools or learning centres or could have.

The final principle is applying good regulatory practise. The requirements are a set of rules, they're like a law. And so we need to be careful in our rulemaking process that we adhere to all the best expectations about consistency, clarity, those kinds of aspirations that we have around regulation.

So we take those principles, we take the context that we've described, and then we carry them through to a set of nine opportunities that we're putting on the table as opportunities for improvement. We've been really deliberate about our language here. These are opportunities, but they're also not recommendations or proposals at this stage. We're in the middle.

of an engagement process. Now, we're going through an engagement process, so please consider these opportunities to be lightly held until we hear fully from the education community in New Zealand and more broadly. The opportunities fall into three categories: programme design, programme content, and quality assurance.

I'm going to talk you through each of them at a high level, but please rest assured there's a lot of thinking that sits behind each of these, which you can find reflected in various documents online which I refer you to, principally our discussion document. So first, in terms of programme design, the first thing we're interested in as an opportunity there is to clarify what constitutes evidence.

and how evidence should inform programme design. The IT requirements in New Zealand at the moment have an unusual interpretation of what it means to be evidence informed. Essentially, they say to be evidence informed, IT providers need to teach students how to interpret evidence and evidence in the classroom to make decisions about their own practise.

Our sense is that that is a necessary but insufficient component of what it means to be evidence-informed. Yes, we want student teachers and teachers themselves to be able to interpret evidence, but we don't just want the obligation to sit with them. We also want ITE providers themselves to have a strong view of what kind of teaching practices and are genuinely evidence-based, what kind of knowledge they should be imparting, and to be clear to students about where there is a really clear, strong evidence-based or consensus, and when there isn't. So we want to take some of the onus that's essentially been placed on individual student teachers and move it to the IT providers.

The second thing is we want to reframe staff capability away from research production. No one is more enthusiastic about research and evidence around teaching practise than we are. And in fact, you can see that in our first opportunity where we say, we actually want that evidence to be informing how programmes design and operate.

But that doesn't necessarily mean that all IT providers need to be engaged in the production of research and in an intense way. The IT requirements at the moment create an expectation that all IT staff will be engaged in the production of research.

Our sense is that these requirements were designed for a time where universities were the only IT providers, and that is not the case in New Zealand anymore. We have universities wananga politics and private providers, and we want to embrace that diversity and sense of contextualization. Nothing about this would remove universities' legal and institutional obligations to produce research.

Nor would it change NZQA's obligations, which it places on providers of bachelor and master's degrees and graduate qualifications, I should say, to include research production from their staff. But it would mean that ITE requirements are not the driver of that research obligation, and we can change the obligation away from producing research to being engaged with research and contributing, but also absorbing and using that evidence base. The final thing in terms of programme design is a really good example of where we want to balance consistency and contextualization. The opportunity is the idea that we can require programmes to articulate a coherent and complete model of progression. Under the status quo, IT providers, yes, do need to map their content to the professional standards, but there's no obligation at the moment for them to show how all of that fits together into a coherent journey from the beginning to the end of a qualification. And we think it's important to reconceptualize the ITE qualification as a journey where you're taking someone who may have very little initial knowledge and you're preparing them to walk into a classroom and fulfil the professional standards that are expected of them. Large IT providers often have a large number of staff, a large number of different courses, and they have a lot of autonomy given to those individual staff.

We're actually pretty interested in the idea that they should all, each provider, should have a really clear idea of how we go from whoa to go to get a student teacher through and into a position to get effectively into a classroom. So that's the consistent that we would drive is say everyone needs to be able to articulate a journey and show how that journey works.

We're not going to specify exactly what that journey is though, that would be going too far in terms of driving consistency. And there's lots of features of different courses that we want to acknowledge. Some of them are based in schools, others aren't. Some of them are graduate, others are undergraduate. Of course, some are early childhood, primary, secondary, some are even designed for immersion settings.
So we do need to understand the difference there. It's not a one-size-fits-all model that everybody needs to articulate their model. Okay, let's move to that middle column of programme content. Programme content is about the what, what goes into IT. And the first opportunity that we talk about here is the fact that...

Part of what goes into ITE is a question of what knowledge can we already assume someone brings into ITE. There are literacy and numeracy standards in place at the moment. Those are recently recent developments and reforms in New Zealand. Given how many other places there are for us to put our focus and attention, we're not suggesting a wholesale change to that process, although we're really open to hearing feedback. What we've heard is that there may be virtue in some consistency about how those things are assessed, what assessment tool is used, but it's not something we would want to spend a lot of time. The second idea under programme content really goes to the heart of what we're describing in this process.
and that balance between consistency and contextualization. We think there is an opportunity to introduce greater specificity regarding the required content, which IT providers must include in their programmes to ensure alignment with the 2026 standards for the teaching profession.

At the moment, that obligation to figure out how that works sits with the individual IT provider, one of twenty-nine, and it's entirely possible that they can make that decision in different ways. We see significant virtue in coming up with a common shared core or a curriculum which says this is content which we expect to be common across every IT qualification. And once that's implemented, we can reasonably assume that anyone who comes out of one of those qualifications is going to walk into a school, a KUDA, an early learning centre, and they're going to know certain things and know how to operate as a result.

It's one thing to get on board with the idea of that and that consistency and specificity, and many people we talk to are easily able to get on board with that. It's another thing to agree on what that specific content should look like. At this stage in the process, we'd love to hear ideas. We've given some examples in our discussion document.

What might it look like to create specific expectations around knowledge about Te Tiriti or Te Ao Maori? What might it look like to have views about the level of understanding of cognitive science, the science of learning that teachers should have? What indeed might it look like to know about best practise in early literacy teaching? or behaviour management, or how a teacher should be expected to engage with New Zealand Sign Language in a classroom. There's lots of different choices there, and it's important to separate out the idea of a mechanism and then how that mechanism should be applied and when it should be applied.

Okay, moving on to the third example around programme content. We need to look at embedding clearer expectations for high quality professional experience, can be called prac or practicum. We know this is a really important component of ITE. We also know that student teachers' experience when they go out into schools is variable. Now, the ITE requirements aren't going to solve this problem as a whole. There's a lot of things that we need schools to do, and more importantly, there are things that we need schools to be resourced and equipped and supported to effectively to welcome and support student teachers within their regs.

The ITE programme requirements can't actually deal with that. What we can do in the requirements is say, hey, here's what expectations of high quality professional experience looks like. Here's what you as an ITE student should be expecting when you go out to a school. That's a movement in the right direction, but we freely acknowledge it's not the full response to that picture.

Okay. Fourth idea.

If we've got this national standardised core conti that we all agree everyone should have, let's test that. Let's test that clearly with a standardised external assessment so that anyone who's coming through ITE has to admit a particular standard before they can finish that qualification. In the age of AI, but also just in the age of the need to to drive consistency and confidence in the profession, we see a lot of value in the idea that there could be one or more externally moderated assessments as part of the IT process. What do we mean by that? It's not set by the IT provider. It might be set by NZQA, the ministry, might be set by a different IT provider. Don't know. but the idea is that it comes out differently. We would like to preserve some contextualization. We're not saying it necessarily needs to be at this point in the qualification. We'd like to have some flexibility about the way that it's implemented, but we see some value and consistency of having that implemented at a national level.

The final point around programme content then is establishing clearer links between IT preparation and supports for early career teachers. It's unfortunate that we often think about IT as one thing and the experience of an early career teacher as another. I think early career teachers and teaching students will tell you. It feels fuzzier than that; it's not like you walk out of university one day fully formed as a teacher and walk into a classroom and don't need any additional support, so we would really welcome that broader conversation about how all these things fit together, but again, we have to be honest and say we know that IT requirements by themselves are not going to fix that picture. There are things that we think really great jurisdictions do in the first few years of someone's career that actually aren't governed by the ITE requirements in New Zealand. Okay, final area is quality assurance mechanisms. So let's say we get something like the opportunities in programme design and programme content up and implemented in a reasonable time frame in Aotearo, how do we know that they've been implemented well? Well, there are mechanisms in place in New Zealand at the moment for approval of programmes, monitoring and moderation, but we're not sure that they're being used well or to their fullest extent. We hear that there's variable practise, different providers have different experience. The composition of panels doing approvals comes from a long list. There's some convention about the way it works, but it's not actually clearly set out.

So we think there are opportunities for strengthening the rigour and consistency of programme approvals. We also think there are really good opportunities to use that process to reinforce some of the earlier opportunities and ideas that we have around, for example, is that shared core of content being taught and really taught effectively? Is there actually that coherent model in place that progresses students from one point to another?

So those are the nine different opportunities which we've outlined at this stage. There could be others. As I've mentioned earlier, we haven't had the virtue of full engagement at earlier stages in our process.

So we really welcome any perspectives that you have on these through our consultation process. Which brings me really to talking about how that engagement process works. And a spoken said consultation, that comes later. That's the ministry, we're engagement at the moment. So engagement is in process right now, between the 2nd of October and the 30th of November, 2026. There's lots of different ways to engage.

You probably found this video online and so you may have already seen some of the engagement materials, otherwise follow the QR code. You'll find our discussion document and more material that speaks to the ideas that I've presented today. You'll find a survey, there's a short or a longer form version of that to fit your circumstances and the time that you're able to contribute. You'll also find that there's an opportunity to make a submission, and you can do that in a range of different formats. We want to be really clear. We would be delighted to hear from you. We would be grateful. We will be listening and reading very carefully to hear what you have to say. 

Your feedback from that engagement process will fundamentally influence, change, reinforce, or challenge the kind of ideas that we've developed in this process, and we absolutely welcome that. So after this process concludes, we move into analysis and proposal development. Danielle and Mahan-Jenkins will still be involved and reviewing and analysing the kind of feedback that we've had during engagement. Key themes, we'll have some advice and thoughts for the Ministry, including providing advice to the Ministry's EAG, External Advisory Group, which includes representation from across the profession in New Zealand, including representation of the university sector and non-university IT providers. That's going to happen roughly December to March. Then the baton passes from Danielle Mahon-Jenkins through to the Ministry.

The Ministry, as part of their formal legislative obligation and the requirement of the Secretary of the Ministry of Education to own the requirements, will consult on potential changes to the requirements themselves. That means the formal legal text that would be changed and that's not something that we will be driving as a process.

That's all I want to talk to you about today. Thank you very much for listening and your interest in this really important mahi. We're very grateful to you for taking the time to invest and engage in this process. And we really hope you'll take one of the many opportunities that we have for you to provide feedback about this process and some of the comments that I have made today.

Kia ora, thank you very much.