Tolley: National Standards won't raise achievement

At a recent Port Hills meeting in Linwood Rugby Club, the Hon Minister for Education Anne Tolley finally answered some of the key questions regarding the introduction of untrialled National Standards into our primary schools.

Anne Tolley stated that currently New Zealand students do achieve well, achieve really well, but that the bar needed to be raised higher and her standards would be higher than the New Zealand normed benchmarks that are currently used.

Commenting that raising the bar would automatically raise achievement led to several more detailed questions from both parents and teachers in the audience. When Anne Tolley finally answered the question about whether standards would actually raise achievement of actual children, she stated that they would not.

Standards, she said, would tell parents if their child was failing, in plain language that they could understand. When questioned about the effect on children of reading reports that used negative language like failing, below standard, well below, Anne Tolley asked why parents would want to share reports with their children. Continuing on, and contradicting her presentation Anne then stated that schools did not have to use the words "well below standard, below standard, at standard or above standard, schools can use whatever language they like, check the NAG."

There were comments from the Hon Minister that do not bear repeating by anyone and I was embarrassed to hear whole groups of people described as "unable to understand school reports" and "afraid to go into schools". Even more embarrassing was the Minister's refusal to hear the question of a member of one of those groups of people.

I cannot understand why $23million needs to be spent to 'tell parents in plain language they understand that their child is failing.' Surely this $23million would be better spent providing programmes that we know work to support struggling students and enable them to make progress.

The Minister was very clear that there is no extra money to help these children once we identify them using these new (and very expensive standards) and that using the researched and trialled tools that already exist is not good enough because they are not understood by parents.

The Minister clearly fails to understand what the terms 'normed', 'average', and 'learning difficulties' mean. Just because I set a goal to be fluent in Russian doesn't mean that I will ever be able to achieve this. It is cruel to tell students who are already struggling that the bar has been raised even further, so that no matter how hard they work they are even further behind.

The idea that parents won't share reports with their children is bizarre. Schools have been using parent-teacher-child conferences to share information as it is best practise and ensures parents and children are hearing the same thing. There is no point in having standards just to have them. If as Anne Tolley said "standards will not improve your child's learning" then what is the point?