Principals air feelings on national standards and new curriculum: “trial the standards, not our kids”
Golden Bay’s schools have begun introducing the new national standards in literacy and numeracy. According to the Ministry of Education’s website, the standards “will help children do better in reading, writing and mathematics by being clear about what they should be able to do, and by when”. From the start of this school year they must be applied to all students from years 1 to 8 in English-medium schools.
Schools must integrate national standards into their reports to families and whanau this year and in 2011 they must also report to the community on their school-wide progress and achievement against the standards.
The national standards have been controversial, partly because teacher and principal organisations say they have been imposed from above. Their introduction also comes during the implementation stage of a new school-wide curriculum. The GB Weekly spoke to some principals to find out how the introduction of the standards would be managed in the light of the new curriculum and what differences students and parents will notice as a result.
“We’re not going to waste energy moaning about the national standards,” said Motupipi School principal Mark Cullen. “We don’t see them as frightening. We’ve always set high standards, so instead of setting our own standards in maths and literacy, we will now use the ones set by the ministry. We feel they are generally attainable and at present our teaching won’t need to change. It’s a worry that the ministry apparently thought that many schools don’t report in plain language. Consultation with our parents indicates that our school community is happy with the way we report. We’ll be continuing to report to parents on whether their child is achieving below, at or above the expected level for their age or year level.”
Mr Cullen said that his school was concerned that results would be published by the media and that schools would be compared.
“It could be easy to identify individual children in a small school, which would be a negative aspect. Overseas evidence shows that the curriculum becomes narrower as schools tend to teach to the tests, and consequently areas which help develop the full person, such as camps, sports, music, art and drama, etc, may be overlooked or seen as less important than achieving the national standards.”
As for the new curriculum, Mr Cullen said that his school valued the flexibility it allows.
“The curriculum won’t change much at Motupipi as we have always had lots of hands-on and individualised learning, as well as utilising learning opportunities as and when they present themselves. We’ll be using lots of inquiry learning within integrated learning areas.”
Takaka Primary’s principal Neil Batten said that parents of his students would also not see much change in curriculum terms.
“What’s really important, especially at primary school, is that the curriculum should be holistic and that creativity should be emphasised. The new curriculum is really good. It allows us to move in the direction we wish to. The problem I see is that if there is too much emphasis on the national standards in literacy and numeracy it’s going to work against the philosophy of the new curriculum and, ultimately, standards themselves.”
Liz Batten, principal at Central Takaka, agreed.
“It’s good teaching practice, a supportive school environment and lots of support from home that raises children’s achievement – not national standards,” she said. “We already have a raft of good assessment tools which good teachers use to inform their planning.”
Mrs Batten spoke of a nationwide campaign being launched by the NZEI, the primary teachers’ union.
“The slogan is: ‘trial national standards, not our kids’. The new curriculum had a three-year lead-in process with lots of professional development for teachers, but the standards have just been imposed without any thought of a trial.”
Roger File, the principal of Golden Bay High School, supports the idea of a trial.
“NZPPTA [the secondary teachers’ union] has come out in support of a trial of the national standards and it just makes so much sense,” he said. “All of the money being spent on this exercise would be better spent on supporting real teaching and learning strategies rather than how schools report to their parents and the community.”
Because schools must report to their communities about their progress against the national standards, Mr File believes that so-called league tables, where raw statistics are used to compare schools’ performances, are inevitable.
“The information is out there for public scrutiny and it’s going to be used in a way to get at schools,” he said. “Once the media gets hold of information, you can’t be sure that their conclusions are reliable. We’ve seen it with the NCEA figures and it doesn’t matter how often principals explain that you can’t directly compare, people do.”
Collingwood Area School’s principal John Garner said that he was waiting for the Government to come back to teachers with some educational evidence that shows national standards have worked in other places.
“All the experts say they do not help,” said Mr Garner. “They’re a total distraction from the whole thrust of the new curriculum. Because they work on a pass/fail idea they’re a return to the old days of School Cert. The standards are arbitrarily imposed so they don’t take account of individual students. To say that there is a standard that all eight-year-olds should be able to reach is actually detrimental to boys. There’s good research to show that boys’ brains develop more slowly than girls’ brains in terms of their linguistic ability. We run the risk of telling boys that they’re failing year after year. We have to implement the standards this year but I would be more supportive if the Government could provide an argument that showed children will be better off, rather than the political bullying they’ve been indulging in.”
Neil Wilson
