Govt delays full implementation of national standards

BY JOHN HARTEVELT - EDUCATION REPORTER

The Government has abandoned its plan to fully introduce national standards in primary and intermediate schools next year.

The partial stalling of standards, announced yesterday by Education Minister Anne Tolley, comes four months after The Press first revealed that primary school league tables could be constructed out of the standards.

The news sparked a campaign by unions and the Principals' Federation to delay the standards by at least a year.Tolley announced yesterday that schools would not have to report back to officials on pupils' performance against the standards until 2012.

However, Tolley said parents would still have to be told how individual pupils were achieving against the standards from the beginning of next year.

National standards in reading, writing and mathematics for every pupil aged five to 12 would be published and circulated to schools in October.

"It's a staged implementation," New Zealand Educational Institute (NZEI) president Frances Nelson said yesterday.

"It's a logical sequence in the process that will work much more readily."

Nelson said teachers would next year start telling parents where their children sat against the standards while they "continued coming to grips with the new tool".

"We're really quite happy to be starting that implementation process next year," Nelson said.

It would have been "impossible" to return all the data to the Government before 2012.

"She [Tolley] doesn't want us to make a mess and neither do we, so there is a kind of tacit agreement that it is the most sensible way to go forward."

Nelson said Tolley had agreed with the sector's concerns and "been prepared to change the way that initially she thought it might work".

Principals' Federation president Ernie Buutveld said the Government had dumped its originally "adventurous" timeframe.

"The Government comes out of this looking pretty good really ... A wee while ago they were talking about a stoush," he said.

Both Buutveld and Nelson said they still worried about the potential for league tables.

"The true test will ultimately be in 2012, when we have the reporting to the ministry or whatever agency is going to hold that data," Buutveld said.

The Press understands an intermediate research agency may be given the data, before it is passed on to the Ministry of Education.

Tolley said the new timeframe showed she had fulfilled her promise to listen to the concerns raised during consultation.

NATIONAL STANDARDS TIMELINE

* OCTOBER 2009

National standards of achievement in reading, writing and mathematics against which every pupil aged five to 12 will be measured will be gazetted, published and distributed to schools.

Boards instructed to include implementing standards as a priority in their 2010 charters.

* 2010

Standards come into effect and schools are required to use them to guide teaching and learning.

Schools report to parents about their child's progress and achievement against the standards.

*2011

Schools work to national-standards targets set out in 2011 charters.

* 2012

Ministry receives annual reports that include school-level data against targets set for national standards achievement.

- © Fairfax NZ News