There have been quite a few sensational headlines in the papers about National Standards, some indicating that all principals are against them. They comment that National Standards will lead to league tables; that Standards failed in England; that the Standards are not tested; that schools with low-ability children will be labelled as failures; that children who need help will be labelled as failures; and that you can't expect all children, especially special-needs children to meet a Standard.

I would like to make the following points: Because no specific test is required, it will be almost impossible to create a league table showing one school's performance compared with another school. In England they use a totally different system, where specific tests are required to be sat by all pupils, thereby making it easy to create comparisons. League tables have existed in secondary schools in New Zealand for many years. You can go to the NZQA web site and compare one secondary school against another.

The National Standards are drawn from the requirements of the New Zealand Curriculum. It is a red herring to say the Standards need testing. The Standards are based on what we are meant to be teaching. The standards for Year 5 and 6 states: 'That children will be working towards achieving level 3 of the NZ Curriculum'. We have always said that. But the obstacle was the New Zealand Curriculum itself. It was broad, woolly and non-specific.

What does 'explore number' actually mean? It did not say what specifically had to be achieved to be working at level 3. Now, Standards give us more specific direction to what level 3 means. The Standards are an interpretation of the NZ Curriculum.

It does not matter what ability a school's intake of children has. The main drive of the Standards is to measure the value a school adds to children's learning. How much has their reading level improved this year? In fact, a low decile school could be seen to be doing a far better job that a high decile school.

In any one year, a third of the children at Awakeri receive special assistance. At no time are they labelled as failures and those who say this will happen under National Standards can't be running a fully inclusive learning environment in their school.

At Awakeri School, we created our own standards, our own 'benchmarks'. These, like the National Standards, were taken from the New Zealand Curriculum. We have been reporting on these benchmarks to parents and the BOT for years. We have been backing up our teacher judgements with the use of assessment tools such as PIPS, STAR, PAT and asTTle.

The results of these, both good and bad, are given to the BOT. We know the abilities of our children, we assess progress and when progress is not occurring to our satisfaction, programmes and teaching are altered accordingly. For Awakeri, and for many schools, there will be little change in assessment practices. All we need to do is tweak the benchmarks that appear on our reports so they reflect the new standards.

For some schools however, this move is viewed with fear. ERO reports show that 50% of Primary schools do not use proper testing tools and have no real idea of the abilities of their children compared with other schools. The latest ERO report on the teaching of Reading and Writing in Years 1 and 2 is a sad indictment of some primary schools.

Only by looking at a national sample can you actually see where your children are at. They might be top of the class in your school, but are they really performing at the top? We have had many instances of children arriving at Awakeri who find themselves in a lower reading or maths group with parents saying, "But at the last school I thought they were doing really well as they were in the top group."

As a principal of some years, I know there are schools that are not doing a good job. I know of schools that do not test their children at all. I know of schools that think they are doing a good job but have no way of really knowing if they really are.

We are accountable. We are here to do the best for our children. They are going forth into a world where they need the best, communication, social, and thinking skills. It is our job to provide these skills. The Standards are being criticised, as they are aspirational. But the Standards have to be aspirational if we are to improve.

Our school was concerned about the levels being achieved in Year 3 maths. Did we accept this? Did we say that an average stanine of 3.3 was the best Year 3 could do? No. Year by year it has been improving. This year, the Year 3 February maths stanine was 5.4, an increase of 2.1 stanines.

Yes, children can improve. Yes, children can move up and down stanines. If you accept what always has been, you will continue to get what we always got. At Awakeri, we care about learning and will continue assessing children to ensure progress takes place. For some, these times can be fearful, for some a challenge.

Children have only one shot at education. It is our job to give them the best. If we want the community to value us as educators we have to prove that our children are better today than they were yesterday.

 

Just to dispel some myths. Having travelled around the world visiting schools I can tell you that we are not the best. The standards are not in conflict with the curriculum, the problem is our curriculum is so woolly and vague, anything can be said to be in conflict.
You do not have to test and test and test. We spend less that 2% of our teaching time on testing. Any school that does more does not have a firm understanding of the relationship between teaching and learning.
Secondary has some form of accountability with NCEA, what is so precious about primaries? Where is the accountability in our sector?
Peter Fitzgerald


There may be no national test currently but since the standards are in conflict with the curriculum it won't be long before one is drafted up so we can test the children against them! We should be focusing on what is relevant and meaningful learning for each child. One size does not fit all. We are already in among the top education systems in the world. We should be concentrating on making our great system excellent not wasting time making national standards, which developed without any consultation with the sector, work!
Hayley Whitaker


Some really good sentiments. As a teacher with 33 years experience, I just find that I spend such a lot of time testing that it eats in to my teaching time. If it really was SMART I would not mind, but we seem to have new ideas each term as to what is best. I still love teaching but feel that it is my relationship which actually makes the most difference.
Kathy Watson