Election 2011 - Party Policies - Education - National Standards

National Standards

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Not set out on their website.

• The Green Party is concerned at the flawed, rushed National Standards, and the way that they could label children as failures and undermine schools in low-decile areas. Parents want informative plain English reports on their own child's progress. That doesn't require a National Standards policy. Research evidence shows that National Standards will not lead to improved outcomes for students. They will simply label individual students as failures, and may lead to league tables that wrongly label schools as failures. Many countries that have gone down this route in the past are now turning away from it. Refusing to recognise the weight of local and international evidence against such policies is most unwise. The Green Party will:
• Remove National Standards and remove the requirement for schools to report against them.
• Support the implementation of the National Curriculum and reinstate the Advisory Service to provide advice to schools on its implementation. (more here)

• Under Labour, schools will not be required to implement National's standards. (more here)

• Abolish national standards and replace with measures that increase achievement, such as reducing classroom sizes and improving the quality of teacher-student relationships. (more here)

Not set out on their website.

• $36 million towards new intervention programmes for students who are identified by National Standards as needing extra support in reading, writing and maths.
• At least 50 expert practitioners from the Ministry and education sector will work closely with targeted schools and teachers, to help raise the bar in education.
• The Ministry of Education is changing the way it delivers professional development for teachers and principals, to focus squarely on lifting student achievement. (more here)
• Information from National Standards and how students are progressing each year in reading, writing, and maths will be used to target support for students who need it most. (more here)

• UnitedFuture is broadly supportive of a system of National Standards, however the current system has been poorly conceived, inaccurately portrayed, badly communicated and hastily implemented. (more here)