Mallard Trevor: Education (National Standards) Amendment Bill — First Reading Second Reading In Committee 
Mallard Trevor: Education (National Standards) Amendment Bill — First Reading Second Reading In Committee 
[Volume:651;Page:568] 
Hon TREVOR MALLARD (Labour—Hutt South) 
: 
 I am speaking in opposition to this legislation and I am doing that not because I think that the Minister has evil intents but because I think she is confused and probably does not understand what she is doing. She certainly has not— 
Hon Bill English 
: So patronising. 
Hon TREVOR MALLARD 
: Well she certainly has not read the National Administration Guidelines. I will read some of them to her because clearly her literacy skills are not at the point of reading them well herself: “Each Board through the principal and staff is required to: (i) … (b) giving priority to student achievement in literacy and numeracy especially in years 1-4 … (ii) though a range of assessment practices gather information that is sufficiently comprehensive to enable the progress and achievement of students to be evaluated; giving priority first to: (a) student achievement in literacy and numeracy”. It is a requirement: “(iii) on the basis of good quality assessment information [to] identify students and groups of students; (a) who are not achieving; (b) who are at the risk of not achieving;”. National Administration Guideline 2 states that it is a requirement to: “(iii) report to students and their parents on the achievement of individual students”. 
The point I am making is that there is already a requirement to do this and the Education Review Office is getting better at making sure that schools are meeting that requirement. This bill is unnecessary. 
If we move to a standards system then it is likely that the progressive achievement test will be the one selected. In my view that would not be a good thing. It is probably the test that is most widely used. It is a test run by the New Zealand Council for Educational Research but it is now generally regarded as being a bit old-fashioned and not up with the play or up with the modern world. We have instead had for 8 years now I think a development at Auckland University. The asTTle system under Professor John Hattie is one that is internationally regarded and used widely through New Zealand. It is working very very well at the moment. 
Hon Clayton Cosgrove 
: You had better explain it to them. 
Hon TREVOR MALLARD 
: I do not want to go into the detail on the asTTle system other than to say that it is mainly computer-based and that it does not give just a raw score but indicates where a particular student’s strengths are and where the student’s weaknesses are across a range of topics. As well as that it can work across a class and show the strengths and weaknesses of a particular teacher and therefore the need for professional development in that classroom in a way that the progressive achievement test being promoted by the National Government has no chance of doing at all. The progressive achievement test gives a raw score and it is essentially useless. What will happen is that we will have a lot more time focused on assessment which means less time for teaching and learning. What do kids go to school for? They go to school to learn; they do not go to school to be assessed. 
I will comment on the UK system. I know quite a lot about it; I looked at it when I was in Opposition before I was the Minister of Education. I spent a couple of our summers getting quite cold looking at the British political and education system. The point I got to was that the British have what is effectively a decile-based system of requirements for schools to meet particular levels of literacy and numeracy. If the schools do not meet them they are punished over a period of years and if they get it wrong substantially then they are disestablished. 
For example a school that is given a requirement that 85 percent of its students are to be assessed at a particular level or higher focuses on the group of students between about 70 percent and 90 percent to make sure that this group gets the school over its 85 percent because that is seen as being successful for the school. What happens if a pupil is in the bottom 10 percent? That pupil is essentially ignored. What happens if a pupil is in the top 70 percent? For a large period of the year that pupil is essentially ignored. What happens is that there is a lot of focus on that assessment but it is on only a very narrow range of kids rather than on kids from across the board. 
I will tell members a little about Wainuiomata and what has happened there in my electorate and in the town where I live over the last 4 or 5 years since we have had change there. We have moved in schools that are all either decile 3 or decile 4 towards literacy and numeracy results that are above the national average in New Zealand—sitting up around the results of a decile 6 school on average—as a result of intensive work and some very good assessment using the asTTle system. The schools have done it voluntarily and they share the information from school to school. 
One of the reasons the system works brilliantly in Wainuiomata is that schools share information vertically with the intermediate school and the secondary school and they share it with each other with schools next door in a cooperative way rather than in the competitive way that will inevitably result from the national testing and the league tables that will flow from this. I can tell the Minister that if schools are required to keep this information then it will be available under the Official Information Act and league tables will be appearing in newspapers all over the place. 
I also acknowledge Hekia Parata for the work that her family has done up on the East Coast in this area. Again enormous progress has been made in groups of schools there where there has been a special focus on teaching and learning and incidentally on assessment. It has been led by the teaching and the assessment is incidental to it. 
Hon Member 
: Are you supporting it? 
Hon TREVOR MALLARD 
: No I am not supporting the bill at all. What I am saying is that it gives undue focus and it gives one system and there are quite a few systems in New Zealand that work very well. There is already a requirement to use one of them; it is in the national assessment guidelines. The Minister should read her own guidelines and then she will understand. 
I will go back to the Maori and Pacific Island students in Wainuiomata and tell the members of the House that throughout the valley this group of kids quite often on average progresses at twice the rate of the national average for that age group. Quite often the average gets 2 years instead of 1 year and that is very special and it is something I am very proud of. But the reason it happens is that people work in a cooperative collaborative way and do not have things imposed on them. 
I will do a little mea culpa here. A couple of years before I became the Minister of Education I contemplated policy of this type. I contemplated it I spoke about it I had an enormous amount of dialogue about it around the country and at the point of becoming the Minister of Education I was at the point where I knew that it would not be effective. That is why the previous Labour Government put enormous resources into teaching and learning and into the development of the asTTle system. 
I tell the Minister that the asTTle system is not ready to be introduced even in 2010 as a compulsory national testing system. It is not there it is not ready and it will not work for that. The only choice the Minister will have if she is really to have national standards will be to have national testing. I think all of us understand that—I think all of us other than the Minister understand that. If we are to have national standards then there can be only one system in New Zealand and that will be the progressive achievement test system. That will mean that we are working our way back to a system that was seen over a period of time as being very very good then good and then actually pretty average when compared with the rest of the world and it is now seen as being somewhat behind the times. Part of the problem with this approach is that we can have someone who is waving a flag for standards but she is actually causing those standards to regress as a result of the work that she has done. 
The last point I would make is that if I were the Minister of Education I would love to have the powers in this bill. There is excessive ministerial power in this bill in my view. Not having to properly gazette and not having to put things into regulation and have them subject to review or proper scrutiny is very bad and no Minister including myself should have that power.