Correction · 23 May 2026
An earlier version of this article said the Curriculum Insights and Progress Study “tracks how children feel, not how they perform”. That was wrong. The study is fundamentally an achievement study, established in 2023 as the successor to the National Monitoring Study of Student Achievement and the National Education Monitoring Project before it. It measures Year 3, 6 and 8 students against the refreshed New Zealand Curriculum in reading, writing and maths. The attitudinal findings reported in this article are one strand within a wider study that also tracks concrete performance. Thanks to commenter RBL for flagging the error.
The proportion of New Zealand Year 8 students who say they dislike reading has doubled since 2019, and the share who say they dislike maths has more than doubled since 2018, according to new findings from the Education Ministry’s Curriculum Insights Study.
The research, carried out by the University of Otago and the New Zealand Council for Educational Research, tracks how children at Years 3, 6 and 8 feel about reading, writing and maths, and how confident they say they are in those subjects. The latest results paint a picture of older primary school children steadily losing interest in core academic work, even as the curriculum that delivers that work goes through one of its biggest shake-ups in years.
In 2019 around 8 percent of Year 8 students said they did not enjoy reading. By 2025 that figure had climbed to 16 percent. The proportion of Year 8 students who said they were not good at reading rose from 6 percent in 2019 to 13 percent in 2025. At Year 6 the change was even sharper, with dislike of reading jumping from 4 percent in 2023 to 11 percent in 2025, and those who said they were not good at reading climbing from 2 percent to 10 percent over the same two years.
Maths followed the same pattern. In 2018, 9 percent of Year 8 students said they did not enjoy maths. By 2025 that share had risen to 19 percent. Belief that they were not good at maths moved in lockstep, climbing from 9 percent to 19 percent.
Only the youngest children bucked the trend. At Year 3, dislike of reading actually fell, from 13 percent in 2023 to 10 percent in 2025.
Sue McDowall, a senior researcher at the New Zealand Council for Educational Research, told RNZ that some of the change between the older National Monitoring Study of Student Achievement and the newer Curriculum Insights Study could reflect changes in how the survey is run, but the broader direction was real.
“We see internationally and in New Zealand a general overall downward trend in reading motivation over time,” she said.
McDowall said motivation and achievement tended to move together. “It works both ways,” she said, describing the relationship between how much children enjoy a subject and how well they do in it.
Ruth Boyask, an associate professor of education at AUT, suggested the shift may be linked to changes in how reading is taught. The rollout of structured literacy, which uses set sequences of phonics-based lessons and prescribed texts, gives children less autonomy over what they read in class, and that loss of choice could be feeding into the falling enjoyment scores.
Fiona Ell, an associate professor at the University of Auckland’s Faculty of Education and Social Work, said the pattern was likely driven by more than one thing. The covid disruption of 2020 and 2021 hit upper primary children at the point where they were moving from learning to read to reading to learn, and the subsequent rewriting of the maths and English curriculums had also reshaped daily classroom life. She said difficulty itself was not a problem, since children could find a hard task engaging if they felt supported through it, but a steady diet of work that felt out of reach would eventually push enjoyment down.
The findings land at a politically sensitive moment for the school system. Structured literacy and a new explicit, knowledge-rich maths curriculum have been a centrepiece of the current Government’s education programme, framed as a return to the basics after years of patchy results in international tests. Supporters argue the new approach gives weaker readers and slower maths learners a clearer ladder to climb. Critics worry that the trade-off is a narrower, more directed classroom, with less room for the wide reading and exploratory problem-solving that helped stronger students fall in love with the subjects in the first place.
These findings do not, on their own, settle that argument. The Curriculum Insights Study measures both how children feel about reading, writing and maths and how they actually perform against the curriculum, and the achievement data from the same study has so far shown Year 8 performance broadly steady, alongside international tests like PISA and TIMSS that have New Zealand sitting in roughly the same place it has for the better part of a decade. But the enjoyment trend is hard to dismiss. Children who do not like reading or maths read and do maths less outside school, which over time tends to widen the gap with their more enthusiastic classmates.
For parents, the practical implications are familiar enough. Researchers have long argued that children who see adults reading for pleasure, who have ready access to books they actually want to read, and who are talked with about ideas at home, tend to keep enjoying reading even when school feels grindy. The same logic applies to maths, where everyday counting, measuring, cooking and budgeting tasks can quietly do as much for confidence as a worksheet.
For schools, the picture is more uncomfortable. The new curriculums are still bedding in, teacher training in the new approaches is uneven across the country, and the children who started school during covid are only now reaching the Year 6 and Year 8 cohorts where the dislike numbers are climbing fastest. The next round of Curriculum Insights data, due in 2027, will be the first real test of whether the structured literacy and maths rebuild lifts enjoyment back up, or whether the slide continues.
The full study is available through the Education Counts website, with summary findings reported by RNZ.
What is your experience of how children are feeling about reading and maths in 2026? Have you noticed it in your own household or classroom? Share your story in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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