Q+A’s Paul Holmes Interviews Anne Tolley And Ernie Buutveld.

The interview has been transcribed below.

Q+A is repeated on TVNZ 7 at 9.10pm on Sunday nights and 10.10am and 2.10pm on Mondays. The full length video interviews and panel discussions from this morning’s Q+A can also be seen on tvnz.co.nz at, http://tvnz.co.nz/q-and-a-news

ANNE TOLLEY & ERNIE BUUTVELD interviewed by PAUL HOLMES

PAUL So the school year has started in a climate of some agro between the Primary Teachers' Union, the NZEI, the Principals and the government. At issue the government's new system of assessing the progress of our children from year 1 at primary school. The government's got its first real battle on its hands with this. under the new scheme teachers will assess according to new standards in reading writing and maths, and twice a year parents will be advised in plain language how their child is doing in relation to other kids around the country. Now the Minister running the gauntlet of it all if Education Minister, Anne Tolley. Opposed to its present implementation is the Principal's Federation President, Ernie Buutveld, who I think is Principal of a primary school in Havelock in the South Island.

Minister first of all, lay it out for us nice and simply, how will this new national standards work?

ANNE TOLLEY – Education Minister
Good morning Paul, look it's a really exciting time to be in education, this is probably one of the biggest changes we've seen in primary education in about the last 20 years, so what we've done is we've set clear expectations across all the different assessment tools that schools are currently using, and we've said there will be one national standard, so instead of each different assessment tool having its own norm, we've set one standard right across them all, so that teachers can see how their children are progressing against those standards, report that in plain language to parents, so that they're working with parents when they identify a student who's not progressing as they should.

PAUL So is this a return to excellent, above average, average, below average, well below average? That’s what you mean by plain language?

ANNE Well yes, but more than that, because it's quite detailed when you look at the standards, our parents need that good information so that they can get involved with their child's education.

PAUL They do now.

ANNE No they're not.

PAUL They do now Mrs Tolley, we've already got a range of tests…

ANNE All over the country parents are telling me this is fantastic, we get reports all round the Christmas barbecues Paul, parents are saying I've just got my child's report it doesn’t actually tell me how my child's doing….

PAUL When it comes to standards and assessments the primary teachers will tell us we've already got a range of assessment criteria, a range of tests, that identify the kids in trouble in the system very early.

ANNE So why have we got almost one in five students leaving school without the reading and writing and math skills, that’s almost 150,000 children and that’s been happening for the last ten years, we've been talking about it, and talking about it.

PAUL Ernie from a conversation I had with you on Friday, you actually are not opposed, in fact you said we're all on the same page regarding national standards.

ERNIE BUUTVELD – Principal's Federation President
No no, no, we're on the same page as far as student achievement.

PAUL But you are bothered by the haste of the implementation of national standards is that right?

ERNIE The haste and the process, I mean certainly as any nation – any nation is very much concerned about whether their students are going, the level of achievement comparative to others, that’s not really the issue, so I think we're on the same page.

PAUL But if we've got a problem of one in five are crapping out at school let's go, let's rock 'n roll.

ERNIE Well yes, but let's rock 'n roll down the right path, and that’s really I guess where this word of caution comes in. Is National Standards the answer? We've had a lot of rhetoric from government telling us that we've got a crisis in education, and while there is some data that we need to be aware of and be influenced by we've got to check is National Standards the answer.

PAUL Ernie we can pussyfoot around for years can't we, but at the same time for the last ten years, 15 years, 20 years perhaps, politicians have been talking about the one in five who fail in the education system. So what you’ve got at the moment Mr Buutveld don’t work, does it?

ERNIE Not entirely, nor does National Standards in any overseas jurisdiction that’s gone down that path, in fact they're backpedalling fast, there are other alternatives, Finland for example doesn’t have anything like this and yet they achieve the top end of the world. Shouldn’t we be looking at that sort of data from overseas as opposed to just the one relating to National Standards?

PAUL I mean how is simply communicating better with the parents about how well the child is doing going to lift the numbers who succeed in education? I mean how is actually going to make a difference?

ANNE Of course it will make a difference. Teachers have children in their classrooms for a short amount of time. If you’ve got parents and teachers working together, so you’ve identified the children that are failing and lots of parents tell me – I had an email in after the little pamphlet went out last week saying they didn’t have their child's learning disability identified until that child was nine. Now it's much much harder – they suspected there was something wrong, school said everything was fine, that the ERO report that I released just before Christmas last year showed that principals, 67% of our senior leaders in our primary schools are not tracking and monitoring those year 1 and 2 students, and not reporting good information through to their Boards of Trustees.

PAUL And not setting high enough goals? You'd better answer that.

ANNE And not setting high enough goals, that’s what we need the principals to be actually focusing on.

ERNIE And in our news release at the time we suggested to school leaders that this was salient reading over the holidays.

ANNIE Come on Ernie, you’ve gotta do more than issue a press release, truly.

ERNIE Absolutely, and we've advised our members and school leaders across the country, yes we do need to track ….

PAUL What Mrs Tolley is doing is saying well we're gonna make sure that you start identifying problems at five or six years old, year 1 and 2, very early, which you’ve not been doing, 67% of you have not been doing it.

ERNIE Not as well as we should.

ANNE That’s right. If parents have the good information then they can demand it from their schools, they're entitled to get that information and that will help us help the principals that are struggling, help the teachers that are struggling, but most importantly help the students who are struggling.

ERNIE I think the pathway's fraught with the National Standards, any evidence from any jurisdiction that’s tried it is struggling.

PAUL Anything can be fraught but I spose as we develop the system we'll refine it won't we?

ERNIE Well one would hope so, but let's have a look at putting it in place before.

PAUL If the Minister trials it of course the politics of that are if you start doing a trial it gets sabotaged along the way.

ANNE Well this the misinformation that we've got out there, what we're doing with National Standards is not what's happened in the UK and the US, they have a national test, one day of the year everyone sits the same test.

PAUL When a kid might not have had breakfast

ANNE Exactly, and we've said look we don’t think that’s a good indication of how a child's actually progressing, so we want teachers to keep using the tools that they're currently using which includes testing, but it also includes their observation, their relationship with the child, all those are important, that we track the progress.

PAUL You're also I think wanting to monitor progress, you want to be able to tell a parent in July that there's been progress since the beginning of the year.

ANNE Yep, because children progress at different rates, they come in with different skills.

PAUL Well now that’s a very big point isn't it? Do we worry too much at five or six, is what you're doing having us worry too much what the kids are doing at five and six when we know kids develop in their own time, Ernie.

ERNIE Well we're putting in place a system that’s going to put a label on children from five and a half after their first six months at school, and that label is going to be tracking them as the minister says for a period of time, and the experience again from overseas – I've met children, principals, teachers, parents, tears in their eyes when they’ve been subjected to that simplified label system.

PAUL I've got a question from Paul Buck from KeriKeri and I think I understand the question, it's for Anne Tolley. He says if we know that 10% of teachers are struggling to teach reading and writing which the oft quoted ERO report actually says, rather than at 30% as the Prime Minister suggests, how does National Standards fix this?

ANNE Well it is actually 30% if you read the ERO report 30%, and the ERO report was pretty damning about the quality, but 70% are doing it really well, and let's not lose track of that, how will we help, we've put 26 million dollars into training this year to help teachers, principals and boards of trustees to lift their skills.

PAUL Twenty six or thirty six?

ANNE Twenty six million dollars of training and delivering of reading writing and maths this year. We can't demand that they do that, and that’s why we need the Principals' Federation to be actually on board with this encouraging their members to take advantage of that money.

PAUL Is this 26 million spending over one year?

ANNE That’s 26 million in one year for training around the National Standards, how to embed them into the curriculum and how to use the National Standards.

PAUL So this is a separate 26 million for this year, over and above the 36 million set aside last year over three years to spend – to help students having difficulties, 150,000 of them – 36 million for 150,000 over three years is how much per student, Mr Buutveld?

ERNIE That’s about one teacher per day.

PAUL At about $140 dollars?

ERNIE Per year.

ANNE But that’s additional money, we're already spending tens of millions of dollars on intervention and what the ERO report showed us is that we can't actually be sure that that money is being well directed cos Boards of Trustees are not necessarily getting good information about how well students are progressing.

ERNIE That money would be better spent on improving teacher quality rather than on the measurement of our students. We already know where our students are.

PAUL The worry of course I think many of the teachers have is it will lead to league tables of schools. So how can Baird’s Primary say – no disrespect to Baird’s Primary, ever compete say with little Kings when it comes to rating schools, and that’s what teachers are worried about isn't it.

ERNIE This is John Hattie's concern too.

PAUL Well are you worried about it?

ERNIE Yes absolutely.

ANNE We've set up a working group and Ernie's on that working group. So we've set up a working group who have met twice already and will continue to meet, the assessment academy that John Hattie is a member of have offered to do some work to help, you know we will have a look at it, there's always gotta be a balance Paul between making sure that parents and communities have good information, cos Tomorrow's Schools gives communities the responsibility for managing their school, so you’ve gotta manage that

ERNIE I think if we're going to be realistic we're going to have to look at the wording of NAG 2A, because that really sets in concrete how schools have to report, and from there of course the league tables can be manufactured, and until the Minister really decides to have another look at that I think it's a hollow promise about trying to get a solution to this league table problem.

PAUL So are you going to go for league tables or not, do you know?

ANNIE No, we've got the working group having a look at it, and I also pushed out the time that they have to report to 2012.

PAUL Last question Ernie, who are the teachers really to lay down the law about our education, I mean teachers after all are paid public servants who should implement surely the carefully considered policy of an elected government that signalled the policy before the election?

ERNIE Paul, wagging your finger in a classroom and telling your students to sit down and do what you’re told, is history. It's no good the government using the same sort of tactics on a thinking population, on a thinking group of professionals who have students' achievement at heart.

PAUL There's been consultation for the past 12 months.

ANNE Of which Ernie's group was a something part.

ERNIE There's been some fairly serious criticism about what that consultation said by the Council for Educational Research, so we need to have another look at just what was said around the country.

PAUL Anne Tolley, Ernie Buutveld, thank you very much.

ENDS

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