National Standards need trialling, says principal | Taranaki News | Local News in Taranaki

CENTRAL Taranaki principals are among those voicing concerns about the implementation of the new National Standards in Education.
“A lot of principals out there are feeing pretty vulnerable,” says Stratford Primary School principal Kelvin Squire. “Lots of them have got new boards. I’ve gone to great pains to put all the facts to our new board.
“I’m strongly opposed to the introduction of national standards in the shape they are in.”
The standards were introduced in January with only a few weeks notice. Schools are struggling to cope with implementing standards without teachers first receiving training and there are serious issues with how the standards will be assessed.
“If this is going to be the driver to lift student achievement, then we’ve got to get it right, not take the fire, ready, aim approach,” Mr Squire says.
New Zealand’s education system already performs very well in all the internationally moderated data from OECD countries, he says.
For the past ten years, the entire curriculum has been based on evidence-based teaching and assessment, yet the national standards are untried and similar schemes introduced in other countries have failed, he says.
In his report on the standards, Professor John Hattie of the School of Teaching, Learning and Development at the University of Auckland says: ‘Many countries including the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia, have walked this path, and the path has ended in limited evidence of any improvement in students’ educational achievement, difficulties in removing the national standards policy when it is shown that it has no effect or a negative effect, on student achievement and perverse effects in schools.’
“What I’m saying is, if its worth doing, let’s trial this and get it right. National standards have no evidence,” says Mr Squire. “Education in the last 10 years has been driven by using evidence to inform your decision-making. Interestingly, the Education Review Office, when they come into schools to do a review, will question you on your ability to self assess and the evidence for making these assessments.”
The Stratford Primary School Board of Trustees sent a letter to Education Minister Anne Tolley and Prime Minister John Key after its last meeting, asking that the standards be trialled and offering to help with such a trial.
Mr Squire says other school boards in Taranaki have also written to the Minister.
In a separate move, the education sector union NZEI this week obtained letters to the Minister from 51 boards of trustees under the Official Information Act and 96% of them expressed serious concern and opposition to the standards.
Stratford Primary School is complying with the law regarding the standards’ introduction, but he fears they will undermine and damage the learning of the children they are supposed to be helping.
Under the standards, the schools must report to parents twice a year where their children sit in relation to the standards, which means a child who is struggling will hear repeatedly that they are below the standard or well below the standard.
Stratford Primary School has linked the standards to its own learning milestones, and has added an extra level in its own reports – just above the standard – to inform the parents of the many children at this level.
One major difficulty for teachers assessing children’s progress that the standards do not correlate with any of the accepted tests and assessment that are being used by teachers to determine how children are progressing.
Mr Squire says the problems the standards were introduced to fix – low educational achievement in the bottom 20 per cent of children nationwide - is in many cases a social issue, not an educational one, and won’t be fixed by more reporting of how badly the children are failing.
“Schools are the last bastion of compulsion, we’re seen as the single fix as we have a captured audience, but education is a partnership in my view. School is a vitally important part of that, but of equal importance is the child and the family.
“Input from the family is hugely important. In my view it’s the single most important factor. It’s not a simple thing for educators.”
“I never use kids’ socio economic background as an excuse as to why they can’t achieve, I believe kids can be the best that they can be and schools should be the force behind helping them to be that, but you’re ignoring the rest of the equation at your peril. We get kids coming in here at five who have the cognitive level of a three-year-old, and we have a transience rate here of one third, (a third of the children enrolled here moves in or out every year). There are all sorts of other issues that are socio-economic and identified as being linked with low achievement.”
A basic tenet of a principal’s role was to lead with Manaakitanga, or moral purpose, to first do no harm, Mr Squire says.
“In a lot of people’s minds we are doing harm to a group of children, it’s obvious. These kids who are well below the standard will be told 16 times that they are well below the standard in their time at primary school. That’s not leading with moral purpose.”
Another issue with national standards is that there is no national moderation, says Mr Squire.
“There are lots of big issues around overall teacher judgement. Teachers now have to assess student achievement across schools and between schools, but how do we know the interpretation - Overall Teacher Judgement - is the same in schools in Whangarei, Stratford or Bluff? Assessment is a best fit, not an absolute.”
When introducing the standards, the Government said it was to improve how schools reported children’s progress to whanau.
“This is not about improving reporting to parents, that’s already happening. In research by Professor John Hattie, 80 per cent of parents said they were happy with the quality of information they were getting about their children,” says Mr Squire.
His school recently surveyed parents about their views on its regular reports, Haerenga Akoranga, or learning journey, and 100 per cent of respondents were satisfied with the way the school reports students’ progress.