Roy: Standards will benefit special needs students

A system of new national educational standards to assess primary school students will benefit special needs students, Associate Education Minister Heather Roy says.

Most students, including those with special needs, would benefit from the controversial new system of rating children, Ms Roy told the Parents of Vision Impaired conference in Wellington today.

The standards system had been criticised by teachers, parents and academics, concerned at its one-size-fits-all approach.

Schools would start using the system from next February.

Four academics from New Zealand universities wrote an open letter to Education Minister Anne Tolley this week, saying the standards had been developed too quickly, and public reporting of the standards would "distort and impoverish the culture of teaching and learning and assessment within schools".

"It will not achieve intended goals and is likely to lead to dangerous side effects."

Teachers' union the New Zealand Educational Institute criticised the system's "one size fits all" approach, the unworkable implementation times and said teachers did not fully understand how it worked.

But Ms Roy today said parents wanted to understand their children's achievement and reporting against the standards would help that understanding.

"There is a group of students who are likely to learn long term within Level One of the New Zealand Curriculum. Their progress will be assessed against the standards as part of their Individual Education Programme (IEP) processes, but boards of trustees will continue to report on these students' progress separately, through their charters and annual reports."

Ms Roy also reiterated the Government's commitment to special education for vision-impaired students, despite no action on a select committee recommendation for increased resource teachers.

The Government was spending $15 million to rebuild the Homai specialist school for blind and vision-impaired students in Auckland, and recently announced 400 extra places in the ongoing and reviewable resourcing scheme (ORRS) for funded special-education.

A special education review would look at student access to special education funding and how the funding was allocated, and decide how best to allocate an additional $51 million of funding in this year's budget.

The Government had not increased the number of resource teachers of vision (RTVs) in this year's budget because of "challenging economic times", Ms Roy said.

There were 15 RTVs funded in the 2008 budget, and, in July last year, the education and science select committee recommended an additional 30 RTVs be provided over the next two to three years.

The Government would look at the select committee's recommendations during the special education review, Ms Roy said.

- NZPA