'Sir' backs national standards in schools

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A visiting British principal, famous for transforming a failing London school into an educational success, has come out in support of national standards in schools.

Sir Paul Grant, who will address educationists and government officials in New Zealand this week, says national standards make teachers and schools accountable.

National standards were needed to measure pupils' progress and as benchmarks of schools' performance, Grant told the Sunday Star-Times from London.

"All of us as professionals; we need somebody to have an objective assessment of the work that we carry out," said Grant, head of Robert Clack School in Dagenham, a poor area in East London.

Grant, knighted last year for turning the crime-infested and low-achieving comprehensive into one of 12 officially recognised "outstanding schools" in Britain, says pupils in poor areas gain from national standards.

"If you've got a poor background, and you're not getting a particularly good deal [at school], how else can society get an indication how you're progressing? If the standards in that school are actually not taking the children forward, how else can it be done? Nobody's actually come up with an answer to that."

In New Zealand, the just-introduced national standards – which require twice-yearly "plain English" reports on pupils' progress in relation to standards in reading, writing and mathematics in the first eight years of schooling – have caused much controversy, with some principals saying they will boycott the scheme.

But Education Minister Anne Tolley has said failure to join the scheme would mean principals would be breaking the law.

Last week Hamilton East School became the first in the country to issue student reports based on the new standards. However, at the same time the principal Allan Bull said he was concerned that the emphasis on national standards could narrow the school curriculum.

Grant, who will address meetings in Auckland, Hamilton, Wellington and Dunedin, says he is not an expert on New Zealand and is offering a defence of national standards generally rather than commenting on the New Zealand system. He was "not a government spokesman" and spoke only about his own experience.

Grant said there was a similar controversy in the UK, with most academics opposed to the system.

But he rejects the criticism by Auckland education professor John Hattie that national standards could lead to teachers "teaching to the test" in order to compete. Grant also said standards need not reduce the breadth of what a school teaches.

"It's up to the head of those schools to encourage a climate where teachers don't feel so pressured that they concentrate on nothing else [except the standards].

"In my school, we've been preparing our kids for the tests, but we've got sports teams, we've got drama groups, we've got theatre groups, we travel all around the world, we've got debating societies."

National standards test, based on tests, used to be carried out in Britain at ages seven, 11, 14 and 16. When the tests at 7 and 14 were abolished, 80% of secondary schools still carried out the test that year. Grant said this suggested there was more support for the concept than was suggested by the "overwhelming opposition" from educational academics.

However, Grant does share some of the critics' worries about school league tables based on national standards. "Everybody knows that the state of the school is largely determined by your intake," he said. Even when league tables took account of the educational "added value" pupils received at a school, they did not reflect pupils' sporting ethos, participation in community projects, ability to work in teams, and other desirable qualities.

- © Fairfax NZ News