Andy Jackson
speaker
133 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2026
last heard 19 Apr
Andy Jackson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Apr 2026 with 1.
Appearances
So they might have either two, three or four start dates through the year.
Actually, what's interesting about New Zealand is schools themselves can choose to introduce a cohort entry policy if they want to.
So that was a law change we put through in 2017.
That is quite unusual in that it has eight different start dates through the year.
So you could, if you chose as a school to introduce cohort entry, the start dates would be the beginning and the middle of each of the four terms.
About 12% of schools do use a cohort entry policy.
They have to consult their community on it before they introduce it.
And I think that's one of the reasons why it's not something that's been adopted wholesale across the school system.
So a couple of reasons.
One is that we do get parents and educators who raise concerns with us about it from time to time, and they're particularly focused.
And I think someone you've had on School Shorts before, Jo Knox,
has done some research which suggests that students who've been in school for longer tend to do better than students who've been in school for a shorter time.
And that's at the end of their primary school journey, so around year five or year six, where that evidence becomes clear.
So there is a fairness question about how long a child has been in school and the access to education that they get.
So that's one of the reasons we looked at it.
I think the interesting thing is when we did a consultation on that back in 2018, a lot of people thought that it would be good to have the choice about whether to have cohort entry, but two-thirds of people who responded, which is a really significant proportion, were really clear that they didn't want that to be nationally mandated and they wanted schools to be able to do it.
In terms of why that's the case, I think there's a really strong cultural attraction to cohort entry in this country and that's probably why a lot of schools haven't done it.
People like the flexibility and also I think quite an important thing is that
School is free for most people and early childhood education tends to charge fees.
And so for parents who are working, obviously that's a pretty big deal.
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