Setting ABC standards

Fairfax

LEARNING LEVELS: By the time they reach high school, pupils will need to write using complex punctuation, and be able to do metric conversions.

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After a year at school every pupil should know the alphabet and be able to count objects up to nine using fingers, under proposed literacy and numeracy standards.

By the time they reach high school, pupils will need to write using complex punctuation, and be able to do metric conversions.

The draft national standards for numeracy and literacy were issued by the Government yesterday for consultation with families, teachers, principals, and school trustees.

Parents will be able to assess their child's progress against national academic standards, but educators say the standards are too general and meaningless and fear they could be used to make schools compete against each other at the expense of pupils.

Schools will also be required to report to parents and communities in plain language about their child's progress, including:

How their child is doing against each national standard.

How their child compares with others in the same age group.

If their child is having difficulty and how the teacher and school will handle this.

Steps parents can take to support the child's learning at home.

Instead of using new national tests, the standards will be garnered from existing methods.

Education Minister Anne Tolley said schools would be asked to compile reports for the community on their progress toward meeting the standards.

"We want to see more students leaving school with good qualifications and to give parents, families and whanau a clear picture of how their children are doing."

But Wellington school principal Perry Rush said the standards were too vague. "They will set an expectation, but is it useful? As an educator that doesn't tell me anything I don't already know and it's not going to be particularly helpful to mums and dads."

Principals Federation president Ernie Buutveld said there was a danger the standards "could be used to lay blame and create competition among schools because no school wants to look bad in the media". About 45 meetings for parents will be held nationwide before the final guidelines are published in October.

UP TO SCRATCH?

By the end of year 1, pupils should be able to solve maths problems such as:

-You have four teddies, you get five more teddies. How many teddies do you have now?

-You have eight strawberries, you eat three. How many strawberries do you have left?

They should also be able to:

-Identify all letters by name and produce an associated sound for each letter.

-Understand the purpose of an increasing range of punctuation, including speech marks and exclamation marks.

By the end of year 8, pupils should be able to work out:

-Mani competed in the triple jump at the athletics sports. Her jump was 2.65m and her step was 1.96m. The total of her triple jump was 5.5m. How long was her hop?

-Andre has ordered 201 tennis balls which are sold in cans of three balls. How many cans should there be?

-Use a variety of features such as charts, diagrams, rhetorical questions and metaphors,

-Include complex punctuation in text, such as semicolons, colons and parentheses.

- © Fairfax NZ News