Browns Bay School

National Standards

02 June, 2010

‘National Standards’ and Browns Bay School

In recent times there has been a considerable amount of media coverage about the introduction of ‘National Standards’ with all sorts of strong and emotive comments from those opposing this new move and those supporting it. We felt it was important for parents of Browns Bay School to know a little of what this is about and how the school is looking to approach the introduction on ‘National Standards’.

Firstly a couple of statements that need to be made very clear:
National Standards is not national testing – there is no test that students will sit or work towards, as in the case in several other countries.
National Standards do not replace the excellent New Zealand Curriculum – in fact they are built strongly on the NZ Curriculum.

We at BBS, do not see National Standards as an major issue for our school or for our students and we intend to implement these in a gradual way over a period of time.

National Standards have been established in Reading, Writing and Mathematics for Year 1-8 students. They have not been developed in other essential learning areas.

National Standards have been set up as ‘signposts’ of where a student might expect to be after 12 months, 24 months, 36 months at school and thereafter at the end of each year level – i.e. Yr 4, Yr 5, Yr 6, etc.

We all understand that students do not necessarily progress in a steady, linear way and that there will be some variation in whether students are above, at or below the suggested standard but this may change within a short period of time. We also appreciate that the key aspect is progress and next steps in the learning journey.

The standards describe the characteristics of the achievement in reading, writing and mathematics at these specified points.

To determine where each student fits in relation to the relevant standards, schools will use the range of assessment tools they are currently using. It is not about new assessment tools or new ‘tests’. For schools which use a limited number of assessment tools, additional may be required but this does not need to be done at BBS. Some of these are ‘formal tools’ but it also includes aspects such as teacher observation and anecdotal assessment.

In our opinion, ‘meeting the standard’ is not our goal – it is knowing where students are in relation to the standard (above, at or below) and moving them on to the next step regardless of where they are at any given time.

Schools will be required to report to parents twice a year in relation to these standards and these reports should be in ‘plain language’. BBS undertook a lot of work on plain language reporting last year and we will continue to refine this aspect. We started a process in the latter part of last year to redefine our reporting processes (this has started with the conferences this week) and will have made changes for the mid-year and end of year reports. We would expect to continue to refine these over the next eighteen months at least.

We do have concerns about the ways in which the reported data may be used (especially by the media) simply because it gives a totally inaccurate picture of school performance.

We do not see National Standards as being ‘harmful’ although it is yet to be seen if they will prove beneficial. In the meantime we enter this journey with positive intent.

The Leadership Team
Browns Bay School
(Roger Harnett, Jo Hewitt, Liz Day, Jacky Carr)

Click on the links below for further information on National Standards:

Reading & Writing Standards

Mathematics Standards