Primary school braces for more bureaucracy

Edendale Primary School teacher Desma Lai with pupils Angus Robinson, 8, left, and Kiran Fausett, 8, right. Photo / Brett Phibbs

Rosemary Vivien remembers seeing how schoolchildren learned their work to national standards when she visited the United States.

"The spelling programme for the week was to give the children the words on Monday and let them learn them on Monday and Tuesday," says the principal of Edendale Primary School in Sandringham, Auckland.

"There was a pre-test on Wednesday, another pre-test on Thursday and the actual test - where the results got reported - was on Friday."

Associate principal Jackie Procter says her daughter had a similar experience teaching in England.

"Her Year 2 class was a nightmare. Regardless of whether the children knew it or not, she had to move them along. The top lot were bored stiff but she just didn't have time to cater for them and the bottom lot got left behind and were considered to be failing."

Stories like these are becoming commonplace in primary schools as teachers with overseas work experience brace themselves for the details of the Government's national standards in reading, writing and maths.

Education Minister Anne Tolley insists that the new system will not copy the national testing regimes of the United States and Britain. She has emphasised that it will concentrate on measuring how much progress children make - not how many pupils reach a certain standard each year.

But principals say they cannot understand why the Government would bother introducing a new layer of reporting bureaucracy when schools work to these kind of standards already.

Edendale Primary is a multi-cultural decile 5 school, where a quarter of students are white and almost as many are Indian. It tests all children on maths, reading and writing when they start and re-tests them in maths twice a year to check progress.

Teachers also do smaller snapshot tests during the year, which they use to decide what level of work to set for each child.

The school uses the results of the main tests to set long-term goals for students, similar to the national benchmarks the Government wants to establish. For instance, the school aims for 90 per cent of children to be achieving at or above their age level in maths by the end of their second year.

More importantly, teachers analyse the trends in detail to check for gaps in children's learning and change the way they teach as a result.

A few months ago the school found some students were good at basic maths facts such as addition and subtraction but weaker on solving maths problems. Students in other classes were the opposite. Teachers realised that some of them were emphasising strategy, while others concentrated on facts, but they all needed do both more consistently.

The school is trying to create its own benchmarks to make test results more reliable. It found writing was harder to assess than maths because it was so subjective. So it has used moderation - reviewing samples of marked work for consistency between teachers - for about three years and is looking to join other decile 5 schools to get a wider comparison.

But like other schools it rejects the idea of national or city-wide comparisons in the form of school league tables - unless, as Mrs Tolley has suggested, these showed only the "value added" from each school.

The principals add that the system would be unfair on children with special needs and English as a second language.

"We want teachers to see where the children are at and say: 'How can I improve the outcomes for these children?"' says Ms Procter. "As opposed to: 'How can I get these children through a test at the end of the week?."'

FACTS NOT JARGON WANTED

Schools will have to give parents clear and practical reports on their children's progress from next year.

The move is a response to criticism that many school reports are too vague and full of jargon phrases, such as "needs to work on surface features" (traditionally known as grammar, spelling and punctuation).

Under the proposals, schools will have to sum up what children know and don't know in simple language and suggest ways in which the school and the parents can help them improve (see graphic on A6).

Assessment expert Professor John Hattie, who wrote a critical study of school reports seven years ago, welcomed the change.

He said about 98 per cent of the 150 reports he had examined described children as "achieving well" or "a pleasure to teach", which was meaningless.

Edendale Primary School principal Rosemary Vivien said she liked the suggested format but warned some parents were wary, especially of the actions they were supposed to take.

"The parents have more of an idea of a traditional report. They are saying, 'Talk to us about that but don't put it in writing'."

Q&A

What are the changes?
From next year all primary schools will have to test children against national standards in reading, writing and maths. They will have to report the results to parents in clear language, with suggestions on what each child needs to learn next.

What's wrong with that?
The change to school reports seems popular but schools strongly oppose the idea of national standards.

Aren't educational standards a good idea?
Experts say the gap in the system is not about having standards - we already have plenty - but about how schools use them to improve children's learning. Two years ago the Education Review Office found that primary schools used assessment information well in 80 per cent of cases for reading and writing and 75 per cent for maths. Schools say this shows they are already doing what the Government wants.

Won't that make it easy to move to the new system?
Principals say schools will have to teach to one level for all children, regardless of ability, because results will become all-important. Education Minister Anne Tolley says this will not happen and she is far more concerned with monitoring children's progress. But critics such as Professor John Hattie of Auckland University say national standards would work against this because they make teaching more inflexible.

Where do league tables come in?
The Government's original plan borrowed heavily from education reforms in Britain and the United States, which have introduced standards through national testing. The results can be converted into league tables, which rank schools by their students' results.

Why do principals oppose league tables?
They say they are unfair because students start school with different levels of ability and they push teachers to focus on test results.

Does the Government want league tables?
In April Mrs Tolley said she believed in making as much information public as possible. Last month she said she was willing to let schools report information in different ways, which would make comparisons difficult but not impossible.

Is it a hot issue overseas?
Yes. British teachers are threatening to boycott next year's national tests for 11- and 14-year-olds after a marking fiasco. New South Wales teachers say they will boycott literacy and numeracy testing if the results are used for league tables.

What about the US?
American schools have a strict testing regime under which failing schools have to surrender control to the state.