Standards a potentially seismic backward step

If you’re worried about our kids being sorted into winners and losers, you might want to take a close look at what the Ministry of Education is cooking up. It has spent the last couple of years quietly working on compulsory literacy and numeracy standards – which sounds innocuous enough, until you realise it’s creating a test that four in 10 pupils might fail. And that, in turn, could derail the progress of more than 20,000 children a year, recreating the strong pass-fail, winner-loser dynamic that NCEA was supposed to end.

The problem the ministry is trying to solve is real: government research suggests that up to four in 10 pupils are getting to NCEA level 2 – age 16, loosely speaking – not properly literate or numerate. And, superficially, the problem is NCEA. Rather than test those skills directly, it assumes that pupils will pick them up along the way, if they complete enough unit standards that apparently require strong reading, writing and maths. Unfortunately, and obviously, kids are finding ways around that.

This can’t continue. But is the answer really to introduce by 2023 a set of compulsory literacy and numeracy unit standards, without which students can’t get their NCEA qualification? Yes, they’ll be allowed multiple attempts to pass. But when I asked the ministry, it couldn’t or wouldn’t tell me how long this could delay children’s progress – and how many would fail altogether.

Since there are 280,000 secondary school pupils, 56,000 in each year on average, we are left to assume that up to 40 per cent of them – some 22,000 children – could, in the worst-case scenario, fail the standards each year and leave school with no NCEA qualification. That sounds disastrous.

No-one thinks literacy and numeracy are unimportant. But the rationale for the current system is that the old pass-fail exams – School Certificate and Bursary – were fine for high achievers but damaging for many. I remember the kids at my school who had to repeat seventh form. It was an awful situation. NCEA, in contrast, allows pupils to build up a qualification piece by piece, maximising the return on their scholastic efforts.

Not only do the compulsory standards risk reintroducing a strong pass-fail dynamic, they could badly narrow the curriculum and encourage teaching to the test, just as the failed National Standards did. Low-decile primary schools, if pressed to anticipate the test, might suffer the most, widening inequalities in schools’ ability to give kids a broad, holistic education.

Peter O’Connor, a professor of education at Auckland University, told me it was ‘‘absolutely bizarre’’ to abolish National Standards but then create a high-stakes test that could be even more harmful. He called the proposal ‘‘a madness, a retreat to the past … the most retrograde step in education in over a generation’’. Another education expert, who wished to remain anonymous, was less trenchant but said they still feared ‘‘big casualties’’.

The ministry doesn’t even know who will be most affected, but it will probably be Ma¯ ori, Pasifika and poorer students. A report last year showed that practices like streaming already hurt rangatahi Ma¯ ori. Surely we shouldn’t be adding to this burden.

The problem, in any case, starts well before NCEA. Toddlers whose parents don’t read to them will hear hundreds of thousands of words fewer than those whose parents do. Maths gaps are obvious at primary school. Roughly 60 per cent of the variation in children’s achievement is down to socio-economic factors.

... they could badly narrow the curriculum and encourage teaching to the test, just as the failed National Standards did.

Now, we can’t change all those things overnight. But we could immediately pour resources into reading recovery and maths support programmes that have been proven to work. We could give low-decile schools extra resources and ensure smaller class sizes to allow more tailored teaching. We could narrow the list of unit standards that allow students to indirectly demonstrate literacy and numeracy, and strengthen their rigour.

We could, in short, focus on supporting children to improve, and think about compulsory tests much further down the track and only as a last resort, if the supportive approach completely fails.

As it is, the ministry is ploughing ahead with the planned tests, and has set aside just $10 million, spread over four years, to help students through the changes – a derisory amount.

Whatever happens, the plans deserve a proper national debate. The ministry ran a consultation last year, but the plans have, bar one RNZ article, received almost no public scrutiny. Yet they represent a potentially seismic change.

The ministry is piloting the standards this year and next, with a view to introducing them in 2023 ‘‘as long as the sector is ready’’, though it couldn’t tell me what that actually means. So there’s time to stop, or at least amend, the plan, and ensure we don’t take a step that is the wrong answer to an admittedly serious problem, and in so doing profoundly damage the prospects of so many young people.