11. Hon CHRIS CARTER (Independent—Te Atatū) Link to this
to the Minister of Education
Is she satisfied with the progress being made to implement national standards?
Hon ANNE TOLLEY (Minister of Education) Link to this
Yes, but as the member well knows, there is always room for improvement.
Does she agree that national standards, by definition, must be consistent across all schools to have any validity; if so, can she explain to the House what steps she has taken to ensure that parents can be confident that an achieved standard at one school will be the same as that recorded at any other school?
Yes, the standards themselves are a set of consistent expectations in reading, writing, and maths that show that progress by a student against those standards will enable the student to achieve National Certificate of Educational Achievement level 2. The standards themselves are consistent. I think the member is talking about the overall teacher judgments that will be used by the teaching profession to measure and report on progress against those standards. That is called moderation. The consistency will be supported by what is called moderation, and that will be quality assured by the Education Review Office. The Ministry of Education is providing tools, like exemplars, to illustrate these standards; there are moderation modules for teachers; enhancements are being made to the student management system to support moderation; online moderation case studies of good practices are being provided; targeted professional development will be provided by the ministry; and there is an alignment of commonly used assessment tools. But at the end of it, this Government has absolute confidence in the professionalism and expertise of our teachers to deliver those overall teacher judgments.
Could she explain to the House the rationale for sending all State and State-integrated primary and intermediate schools a letter on 8 October instructing them to put into their school charters new reporting targets for national standards by the beginning of the 2011 school year, when the criteria for defining and moderating those targets have yet to be defined on a national basis?
I seek leave to table the letter, which was sent out from the Ministry of Education on 8 October to all primary and intermediate schools in New Zealand.
Mr SPEAKER