Data on standards ‘ropey’
One fifth of primary schools are still not handling the national standards in literacy and numeracy, a report by the Government’s Education Review Office has found.
The ERO report Working with National Standards to Promote Students Progress and Achievement, examined 439 primary schools nationwide and found 19 per cent were ‘‘not working with all the requirements associated with implementing the standards’’.
More than a third of those schools had refused to implement the standards because they were against them.
‘‘In many of these schools, leadership is lacking, staff turnover is high and considerable work remains to be done in curriculum and assessment developments that lay the foundations for working with the National Standards,’’ the report found.
The standards – a flagship education policy of the National-led Government since before the 2008 election – assess all children aged 5 to 12 as at, above, below or well below benchmarks in reading, writing and maths.
They have been used in primary and intermediate schools since 2010, but schools were first required to send their results to the Education Ministry at the end of May this year.
Prime Minister John Key last night admitted the data coming in was ‘‘very ropey’’.
‘‘The earlier data, in my view, is unlikely to be terribly satisfactory for anybody so it does need a bit more time,’’ he said.
‘‘It’s extremely patchy and it’s in different forms and that will make it very difficult to interpret. But over time, the Government’s hope would be that it would be more consistent because the purpose of having better information is to give parents, I think, a better sense of how their school is performing.’’
But he insisted the data should be immediately available to the public via the media or through a kind of league table planned for release by the Education Ministry in September. The data would get better over time, he said.
‘‘If you don’t measure, monitor and report on things, I don’t think you get progress,’’ Mr Key said.
But teacher union the New Zealand Educational Institute (NZEI) said the ERO report had found only 22 per cent of the schools examined had fully embraced the national standards.
‘‘Schools aren’t seeing the value in working with national standards. They’ve got a long, long way to go to actually even showing that the standards have educa- tional merit,’’ NZEI president Ian Leckie said.
NZEI had urged a law change preventing the release of the data but it had not found favour with the Government.
‘‘Any information from [schools] going into the public domain should be verifiable, should be reliable and in fact, it’s important that the Government accepts a responsibility that it doesn’t go out,’’ Mr Leckie said.
It had also floated the data being held by a third party, such as the New Zealand Council for Educational Research, where it would not be available for release.
ERO chief reviewer Graham Stoop said the latest assessment of national standards had again shown a need for ‘‘strong professional leadership’’ to implement and work with them.