I am delighted for Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern. There is surely no more enriching experience than parenthood. And the joy it can bring unites us, cutting across social and cultural divides.

But following an election year that saw our politicians take a sabbatical from meaningful policy reform, the last thing the country needs now is a year dominated by the Prime Minister’s pregnancy. 

We have much more serious issues to deal with.

At the top of the list are the failings of our education system. After nine years in government, National’s incremental reforms failed to arrest the decline in the performance of New Zealand school students.

NCEA results may have improved, but this tells us more about NCEA’s lack of rigour than it does about improvements in student performance. The international league tables reveal we are continuing to slide backwards.

The latest Progress in International Reading Literacy Study published just before Christmas ranked New Zealand’s Year Five students 33rd out of 50 countries.  We came last among English-speaking countries. And the rate of illiteracy among school leavers is a national scandal.

Why has our national literacy strategy failed?  Is our focus on teaching so-called “21^st-century skills” obstructing school students from gaining the basic literacy and numeracy they need for meaningful work?

What is the proper role of assessment in learning? And is the new Education Minister right to insist we dial it back?

Is the way we remunerate teachers attracting the teachers our children deserve? Does Tomorrow’s Schools provide the necessary incentives to share best practice across schools – and to turn around our failing schools? And what role should the private sector play in delivering the solutions we need?

At the New Zealand Initiative, we will be working on the answers to many of these questions during 2018. We will start the year with an in-depth report on NCEA’s failings - and the changes needed to address them. Other reports will focus on the school curriculum, how to measure school performance, and on Switzerland’s successful vocational education system.

As a new parent, the Prime Minister will have an added incentive to reform New Zealand’s second-rate education system. But we need informed debate, not dogma, to find the answers. Unfortunately, with the edicts on partnership schools and national standards, so far we have seen more of the latter from Minister Hipkins, and less of the former.

With 2018 promising a new beginning for the Prime Minister, let’s hope it delivers a new start for education reform too.