Plain English school report cards pledged in National government

Don Brash

A National-led government would ensure school reports gave parents a clear picture of how children were performing against national standards in reading, writing and maths.

Announcing the policy, National leader Don Brash said the party was committed to raising educational standards and its "plain English" report card was a key feature.

Dr Brash said the standardised report card would give parents a clear idea of where students were performing at a national level and how they were progressing throughout the year against the national target.

The move would help parents get more involved in their children's schooling, especially if there were problems, he said.

"Parents have the right to know if their child is reading, writing and using numbers at the expected standard or if they are falling behind," he said.

"If a parent does not know whether their child is actually making the grade or not they can't do anything about that."

In an embarrassing blunder, the example report card provided to media contained two spelling mistakes - in the report's heading principal was misspelled "prinicipal" and in the teacher's comments "is" was mistakenly replaced with "his".

Asked if National should have paid more attention to its own spelling, education spokesman Bill English said: "I'm sure we could have".

Mr English said many schools already provided a clear picture in their information to parents and National wanted to standardise that.

National testing would not be required, as extensive testing was already done in schools using systems like PAT.

National benchmarks would be set for tests already widely used.

Under other changes aimed at engaging parents, National would:

* Make information comparing schools' performance publicly available.

* Change the way National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA) grades were recorded.

Mr English said information comparing schools was already held by the Education Ministry, but was kept secret from parents.

Releasing the information would provide parents with better knowledge of schools.

He did not believe it would lead to league tables as it would only compare schools similar in student population and decile.

Changes to the reporting of NCEA would include giving one grade for a subject, even when the subject contained several different unit standards.

Standards within a subject would still be reported separately, but a single grade would be aggregated across the subject.

Failure of a standard or subject would also be reported and results would be presented on one page to make it easier for parents and employers to understand.

Education Minister Trevor Mallard said what National was proposing would be impossible to achieve without national testing.

Mr Mallard said New Zealand schools already had strong assessment systems which showed how children were doing against their classmates, other schools and nationally throughout the year.

- NZPA