Mallard Trevor: Education (National Standards) Amendment Bill — In Committee Third Reading 
Mallard Trevor: Education (National Standards) Amendment Bill — In Committee Third Reading 
[Volume:651;Page:630] 
Hon TREVOR MALLARD (Labour—Hutt South) 
: 
 I have before me an interesting blog from the principal of Opotiki College—a college the Minister of Education would not be totally unfamiliar with. He makes within it some comments that are probably better not read in the Chamber. But he makes a couple of pretty succinct points. The first is that the country that has gone furthest along the line of this bill—the United States—ranks 42nd in the international Programme for International Student Assessment tests while New Zealand consistently ranks in the top five. A school in a system that spends a lot of time measuring against a standard rather than focusing on teaching and learning is one that is not succeeding. He indicates the reason for this: spending time weighing the pig does not make the pig fatter. 
The point I want to make is that as part of the learning process having regular quality assessment is important and that is what the National Administration Guidelines do. But doing more—putting it into a national testing system and having a national standard that people have to get to which is the objective of this bill—will add nothing and in my view will in fact take away from our education system. 
New Zealand has an enormous international reputation for teaching and learning especially in the literacy area. We are the home of Dame Marie Clay the person who developed reading recovery which is now the basis of many many systems internationally. We have had a lot of debate around the right way to teach reading. One of the challenges in my time as Minister of Education it might be fair to say was to get some officials within the ministry to accept that there is more than one approach to the teaching of reading and that different things work better for different young people at different times. It was therefore important not to write off particular systems which I think it is fair to say had been written off under Nick Smith and Wyatt Creech as being unfashionable old-fashioned and not working. I refer especially to phonic approaches to reading. As a teacher I say that it is not my favourite approach but there is no doubt that it works for some young people at some stages. 
I felt slightly in two minds about heading down the route taken by Nick Smith and Wyatt Creech. I was supporting the systems that were more old-fashioned. I was supporting the systems that we learnt to read by. I am not saying that they were the best systems for all kids and I am not even saying that they were the best systems for most kids most of the time but I think we got to the point where we managed to more or less drive ideology out of the ministry with this approach. We did a lot of work bringing together the best evidence on the teaching of reading. There was a lot of documentation and a lot of work now informs the teaching of teachers both by way of their professional development and also within the colleges of education. 
This is a slow process. It takes a lot of time to re-educate and to develop in a professional sense people who are teaching reading. We are actually talking about every classroom teacher including most of the teachers within secondary schools. The point I am making initially is that I think it is very important that we do not get ideological in this particular area.