Schools Will Fail First National Standards Challenge

Schools Will Fail First National Standards Challenge

As the new school year begins, the education sector union NZEI Te Riu Roa is challenging the government to say how many schools have met the deadline for sending in their National Standards achievement targets to the Ministry of Education.

Schools were required to send their charters into the Education Ministry by January 31st. For the first time the charters were supposed to include predictions about how many children will achieve or fall below the government’s National Standards.

NZEI President Ian Leckie says it’s the first concrete milestone in terms of the implementation of National Standards but most schools will fail to meet it.

“Expecting schools to have collected information on National Standards, tried to make sense of it and set targets by the end of January was always going to be a completely unrealistic ask,” he says.

Already 300 school boards have taken a public stand and said they will not use the Standards to set their student achievement targets. An overwhelming majority of principals have also said they have no confidence in the Standards and are struggling to set targets against them.

“The implementation of the Standards and the way they are being interpreted varies wildly from school to school, making any information completely meaningless. Using a set of untrialled National Standards as the basis for predicting student achievement is unreliable. There is nothing national about National Standards,” says Ian Leckie.

The government continues to underestimate the levels of frustration in schools and is failing to convince parents that the $36 million being spent on National Standards will deliver any value at all.

“It’s time for the government to genuinely bring it on and clarify how it can have any faith in National Standards-based student achievement data, when so many principals, teachers, schools and parents do not,” says Mr Leckie.

ENDS

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