Fear standards could limit rich education

KIRK HARGREAVES/ The Press

TEAM WORK: A group of nine-year-old pupils from Paparoa Street School put their heads together to tackle an assignment.

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Canterbury principals are concerned new national standards could lead to schools limiting what pupils are taught.

The Ministry of Education's draft national standards, released this week, provide benchmark numeracy and literacy achievements for primary and intermediate school children from next year.

Schools will be required to report to parents in "plain language" about their child's progress, including how their child is doing against each national standard.

Paparoa Street School principal Philip Harding said principals welcomed the national standards, as they would help teachers know what level children should be at in different years.

Reporting to parents was also important, but Harding said the next step of reporting to the Ministry of Education was a "huge threat".

Collated data could be used to create league tables of schools that would "change education forever," he said.

Published tables ranking schools would encourage teachers to focus only on teaching to the national standards to make themselves look good, he said.

"You will be preparing children for those assessments, as opposed to the rich education children now get," Harding said.

"If you agree that you get what you measure, you better be sure that what you want to measure matters most."

Another downstream threat was the possible introduction of national testing, which had caused havoc in the American and British education systems.

Under the new system, Kiwi schools may use a variety of methods to measure a child's achievement, but this could easily change, he said.

Members of the New Zealand Principals' Federation met Education Minister Anne Tolley this week and Harding was "cautiously optimistic" she was taking their concerns seriously.

Tolley has said the Government could not stop the media from accessing the national standards information and producing league tables.

The Press asked her yesterday if she believed schools should be compared against one another and if not, how she planned to prevent this from happening.

Tolley said any information had to be used responsibly to "raise student achievement".

"Some information will need to be collected as part of the national standards policy by the ministry in order for them to target the extra resources where they are needed," she said.

"Just what information is needed and who needs to have access to it is a matter for discussion during the consultation period."

Canterbury Primary Principals' Association president Denise Torrey said she feared the standards would distract focus from the new curriculum, which was meant to be in place by next year.

It was complex and needed a lot of time and energy to implement.

THE TO-DO LIST

What your child should be able to do:

-After one year at school, pupils should be able to do basic calculations, such as dividing six cakes between two people, and identify all the letters of the alphabet and produce their sounds.

-At the end of year 4, children should be able to create simple tally or bar charts and read for between 20 and 30 minutes at a time.

-By the time pupils are entering years 7 and 8, they are expected to be able to work out the volume of a cube and identify a writer's use of language to create a scene or mood.

-Once they are heading to secondary school, they should be able to do more complicated division and problem solving and should be able to recognise a variety of grammatical constructions to aid comprehension.