City principals relieved

The demise of national standards is a long overdue victory for common sense, Waverley Park School principal Kerry Hawkins says.

He was among the many local principals celebrating the announcement that the muchmaligned system is no more.

‘‘If education was a fruit salad, this was a whole lemon bobbing in the middle, tainting the entire salad,’’ Hawkins said.

On Tuesday, the Government announced that national standards had been dropped and as of next year, schools will no longer be expected to report on them.

Salford School principal Robin Harris said he was also very relieved to see the end of national standards.

‘‘It’s great that they’re being dropped because we no longer have to label children as below standard,’’ he said.

‘‘I think teachers had a very strong resentment of labelling children. It is a terrible thing, especially so early.’’

Hawkins said the impact on young children of being labelled was devastating.

‘‘If you tell a kid something often enough, they believe it is true. If a child is eight, and for three years they’ve been told they are below standard, the damage done to their psyche is immense,’’ he said.

Harris said resentment towards national standards had come in equal measures from the requirement to label children and the immense additional workload it created for teachers.

‘‘It has just multiplied the amount of work we did in assessment,’’ he said.

Hawkins and Harris were quick to point out that the end of national standards did not mean the end of assessments.

‘‘That there were no means of measurement at the time was a total fallacy,’’ Hawkins said.

Harris said there were plenty of measures built into the curriculum that could replace national standards.

‘‘We can measure progress using curriculum measures rather than national standards.’’

He said that in spite of the relief that national standards were gone, there were some of the tools created for it that could still be useful.

‘‘There are still some worthwhile aspects that we can retain. It’s taken us a long way forward in terms of assessment,’’ he said.

Hawkins cautioned that there might be some work ahead, especially for teachers who started teaching under national stan- dards. ‘‘We have about eight years of teacher graduates who don’t know anything else, so there will have to be support for them.’’

He said the greatest tragedy of national standards is what it did to the possibilities presented by the New Zealand curriculum that was launched in 2007.

‘‘Not long before national standards were launched, the new New Zealand curriculum was launched,’’ Hawkins said.

‘‘At the time, it was hailed as one of the most forward-thinking in the world. Basically. it was pushing a style of education not seen since the industrial revolution.’’

He said the style of education championed by the curriculum moved away from the need to produce graduates who were all the same, and he was hopeful that it could now live up that its potential.