Changes add to stresses in schools

"Name at the top, give it your best shot," Mrs Andrew says.

"And don't tell anyone the answers," a little voice from the mat adds.

These are the most heavily assessed generation of Kiwi children.

This class of 27 bright-eyed eight-year-old children at Cashmere Primary School know exactly the process for a maths test.

They separate their desks. Many of the children have a drink bottle resting next to their busy hand – something you might expect to see in a three-hour university exam.

When Michael – with what looks like a perfect answer sheet – finishes first, he lifts out a Star Wars book from his desk and reads quietly. Behind him, Sam furrows his brow and bangs his hand against his forehead.

"Oh, I don't get it," he sighs.

The Government is upping the stakes of these tests.

Prime Minister John Key has announced a set of national standards in literacy and numeracy for primary and intermediate-aged children.

There will not be a single test against which all children are measured, but assessment in "the three Rs" (reading, writing and arithmetic) will be super-charged. The results from a range of tests will be stacked up with teacher observations to place pupils above, at, below or well-below the national standard for their age.

The potential benefits of the standards are exciting, but the possible downsides are frightening.

"The question is, will it be done in a way that encourages children to try harder, or might it turn them off?" says Professor Terry Crooks, an assessment expert from Otago University.

"If too much focus is put on low achievement, that doesn't necessarily mean it helps the kids or their parents to do something about it. It may do the reverse."

What are the national standards?The national standards are statements about what five to 12-year-old children should know and be able to do at each year level.

"For example, in reading, we want them to be able to read green texts – the little books with green marks on the back of them – that's a standard after a year at school," the Ministry of Education's official in charge of the standards, Mary Chamberlain, says.

The standards are very clear and they are objective.

"At the end of one year at school, these are the kinds of books you will be able to read, these are the kinds of maths problems you will be able to solve, this is the kind of writing students should be able to do."

However, deciding whether or not a child has met those standards will be not be easy.

The detail will be in "learning progressions". In reading, for example, the child can read 200 words they have not memorised beforehand and they should be able to answer a series of comprehension questions.

At Christchurch's Cashmere Primary School, the Year 3 children were answering questions on measurement.

How would we measure these?

Choose from the box: minutes; hours; days; weeks; months; years.

1. Time taken to eat lunch

2. Summer holidays

3. Length of a music lesson

4. A season

5. Age of your father

6. Time spent at school each day

Performance on this test helps to explain a child's place next to the national standard for numeracy.

There will be other tests, too. Already, about 80 per cent of schools use PATs (progressive achievement tests). Other tests include AsTTle (Assessment Tools for Teaching and Learning), Star and Assessment Resource Banks. These will continue and schools will have an "assessment tool selector" to help them choose the right tests for the right purpose.

Soon, even more new tests will likely be added.

Paper and pencil tests will be important, but they will not be the sole determinant.

Teachers will look at a selection of a pupil's everyday work and compare it with examples provided by the ministry showing what work at each level looks like.

"Imagine a group of teachers sitting together, bringing samples of their student work and putting them into piles, saying `I think these samples are well below, these samples are at and these samples are above,' and then having discussions about their judgments in relation to that," Chamberlain says.

This type of exercise, it is hoped, will happen more often and with the standards at the front of teachers' minds.

It places a lot of onus on teachers getting it right and parents will have to have faith in their skills and professionalism.

Think of your child's teacher as you would your GP, Chamberlain suggests.

"You'd be expecting a mix of tests and observations from your doctor and it's the same for teachers," she says.

Why do we need them?

The idea for national standards was dreamt up by the National Party and announced as policy by Key in April 2007.

Education Minister Anne Tolley says the inspiration was Education Review Office data that showed 56 per cent of primary and intermediate schools were not using assessment data effectively. This caused concern because it meant there was no way to identify exactly where the schools and children going wrong were.

Somewhere out there are thousands of children making up what has often been described as New Zealand's "long-tail of under-achievement".

"That has been our greatest challenge for the last decade," Chamberlain says.

"Those kids that have continued to stay towards the bottom of all OECD countries – we've really got to move them."

But just testing a child does not make them any smarter. In fact, it can quickly discourage them from learning if they form a view of themselves as a failure.

Tolley's plan is to use the results from the standards – including school by school breakdowns on Maori, Pasifika, male and female pupils – to pump extra resources in where they are most needed. So far the money available for that purpose is only $36 million, a trifling sum, according to Crooks.

Crooks reckons if it was targeted at the bottom 10 per cent of pupils it would represent $700 per child, which is the equivalent of two to three days of teaching time.

"It's peanuts in terms of really making a difference.

"I don't know any approach that is going to radically change kids' reading, mathematics or writing in three days of teacher time invested."

Crooks, like all of his fellow education expert friends, emphasises that the standards were a political idea and nobody in the sector ever actually asked for them.

On the other hand, if they are used carefully they might not do any harm and many parents do seem to quite like the idea.

How will they help?

About 3000 parents took the time to make a submission on the draft national standards.

Some said they were mystified by the reports they got on their children and wanted the truth about their progress.

"The feedback we've had from them is there is too much – can you just tell us plainly, simply, where our child is going compared to their peers and compared to the norms," Cashmere Primary School principal Jacqui Duncan says.

Like a growing number of schools, Cashmere has trialled new ways of reporting, including child-led three-way meetings with their parents and teacher.

Parents – it is obvious – need to be invested in their child's education.

By the end of primary school, less than one-sixth of children's hours awake since birth have been spent in formal schooling.

"The overall educational achievements of our children clearly depend more on family and community contributions than on schools," Crooks told an audience of graduates last year.

In a submission on the standards, written in March, the New Zealand Assessment Academy said parents should get "trustworthy and meaningful information" about their children's achievement.

But in research published in June last year, the New Zealand Council for Educational Research (NZCER) raised doubt over the achievement value of an improved relationship between home and school.

"The most striking finding from the review of evidence component of this project was the lack of direct evidence of a relationship between home-school partnerships and improved student achievement," the study found.

Parents understanding their child's performance may have some impact, but it was virtually impossible to prove, the 2008 study concluded.

How could they harm?

At Cashmere Primary School, every child in Years 1 to 4 spends 60 to 70 per cent of their time at school on literacy and numeracy.

Every day, there is a writing hour, a reading hour and a numeracy hour. On the walls, there is evidence of this. "Our statistical investigation" is on one. "We are learning to: read and write numbers to 1000," says the board at the front. And there are pupil "inquiries" into Kate Sheppard, Jean Batten and Sir Edmund Hillary displayed at the back.

Signs of the school's policy for afternoon sessions of art are also visible, with painted Maori designs hanging from the rafters in the classroom. The children of Cashmere also get time to tear around an ample playground.

Critics of the standards are worried that such rich and diverse school days, which are encouraged in our new and broad-based curriculum, will be blunted.

They have seized on a major Cambridge University inquiry of Britain's primary schools, which, in its final report last week, warned of the perils of a narrowed curriculum.

"As children progress through the primary phase, their entitlement to a broad and balanced primary education is increasingly but needlessly compromised by the `standards' agenda," the Cambridge study said. "The most conspicuous casualties are the arts, humanities and those kinds of learning in all subjects that require time for talking, problem-solving and the extended exploration of ideas."

Alarm bells are also ringing in New Zealand over Tolley's decision to reprioritise curriculum support solely to literacy and numeracy for the time being.

"Literacy and numeracy are really important. The question is, do you go at them with a frontal attack or do you go at them also with a more subtle approach," Crooks says.

"Teaching that is creative and exciting for kids is more likely to achieve good results in the end than pounding away relentlessly at core targets. National standards risk that, [but] they don't automatically do that."

Alison Gilmore, the executive director of the New Zealand Assessment Academy, takes a slightly more optimistic view.

"I see the national standards as being a resource for the curriculum – kind of, an explication of the curriculum document," Gilmore says.

"The curriculum document is necessarily quite broad and the national standards support the curriculum and explain to teachers what is intended by the curriculum."

The NZCER, in its submission on the draft standards, praised that the standards offered a broad description of competency, rather than a detailed list of skills and knowledge students must master.

Some of the problems that have emerged in Britain and elsewhere might, therefore, not necessarily apply here.

"We've looked at where we shouldn't head," Chamberlain says. "We've said, `we want a broader approach, we want something that is really going to improve teaching and learning all year and that is based on a range of assessments, not just one'."

All that is virtuous about staying away from a single test would virtually come to naught if the standards data is turned into league tables, however.

A regional or national ordering of schools by the number of pupils above the standard or not, would negate whatever sophisticated methods were used to find those numbers.

As the NZCER notes, the standard itself is a coarse measure.

"They are not valid indicators of school quality on their own," the NZCER submission said. "We would not want to see judgments made about schools on the basis of standards alone, or the information used to name and shame schools and, by association, their students."

When pupils get to know that for the fifth year in a row they are well below a standard, it starts to sting, Crooks says.

Children are resilient until about the age of nine, but after that, they are vulnerable to notions of being dumb and destined for failure no matter what, he says. "So what we do in reporting and teaching methods at primary and intermediate level should be very much aimed at keeping kids turned on to education."

Another concern for the standards is that, in the rush to have them in place next year, they will turn into a train wreck fit to rival the first five years of the National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA).

Schools need new enhanced software to best process the standards – software which will not be available until June next year in a best-case scenario.

The ministry has offered one-hour online "webinars" about the national standards, which will cover the same content as a series of face-to-face regional information sessions to be held this year. The New Zealand Educational Institute has also announced a forum on the standards to be held next month.

"It's an exhausting time of year anyway for kids and families and teachers and to frantically run around and have all of these meetings, to me, shows a lack of ability for us to be reflective and considerate about what we're doing," Canterbury Primary Principals' Association president Denise Torrey says.

"If we're going to do these things, and we want to do them well, we need time to do that."

The Government is largely unmoved by the persistent criticism of the national standards. Tolley has endured a tough year and already some are privately asking if she is up to the enormous task she has bitten off.

But if Tolley's job is on the line, Duncan reckons there are hundreds of teachers whose futures hang on this policy too.

"I think the Government and the ministry need to be careful, especially when we have got a minister of finance who is saying there will be no wage increases for five years," Duncan says.

"We might lose good teachers out of this, they might just say, `actually, it's too hard. There are no rewards in it and it's a thankless task. I'm out of here'."

TIME TABLE

UP TO END OF 2009

The national standards are sent to schools Schools prepare to work with the standards from term 1, 2010

2010

Schools report to parents at least twice a year in writing about their child's progress against the national standards.

Schools make targets for student achievement against national standards for 2011

2011

Schools work to meet their targets for student achievement set out in their 2011 charters

2012

Schools report their progress against the standards to the Ministry of Education

- © Fairfax NZ News