Tolley ignores serious issues in ERO report

Education Minister Anne Tolley’s enthusiastic welcome for a report on national standards ignores issues raised in the same report about professional development support for teachers and the need for schools to have time to consult with their communities, says Labour Education spokesperson Trevor Mallard.

“The Education Review Office report raises serious issues about how national standards are being implemented, and how well trustees, teachers and parents understand them, but Anne Tolley trivialises these concerns,” Trevor Mallard said.

“Anne Tolley has desperately sought to find some positive material in the report, but the one thing she came up with yesterday proves she can’t do mathematics herself. She said the report showed 80 percent of schools are working well with national standards, but the report actually revealed that 80 percent of schools are still not well prepared to implement the standards.

“There’s no evidence she has read the full report. If she had, she should share a number of serious concerns.”

Trevor Mallard said one of ERO's recommendations is that schools ‘continue to use external support for leaders, teachers and trustees to help them understand and work constructively with the standards to raise the achievement of all students in reading, writing and mathematics’.

“How are schools going to do that when they have been trying to get Anne Tolley to realise that there is a real problem in the lack of quality professional development support to assist them in implementing the standards,” Trevor Mallard said.

“The ERO also found, in terms of how schools are using the NZ Curriculum, that those making the best progress had been engaged in the process for some time; had undertaken extensive consultation in the school community, and had put extensive time into working on what schools referred to as ‘the front end’ of the curriculum.

“That’s all obvious, of course, but sadly schools haven’t had time to do these things with national standards because they've been foisted on them with such haste.”

Trevor Mallard said the ERO found that in a third of schools teachers were ‘less well prepared’ to make Overall Teachers’ Judgments in relation to the standards. “About a third of schools were only just starting to look at or hadn't yet considered how to moderate teacher judgements about student achievement, but how can standards possibly be ‘national’ if they are not moderated?

“The ERO says national standards are ‘well understood’ by only 15 percent of teachers and 4 percent of trustees, and that nearly half of teachers are not even aware of the Ministry of Education's self review tools,” Trevor Mallard said. ”Still Anne Tolley is happy, and I suppose schools and parents should all feel happy for her.”

ENDS

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