Recommendations from the National Standards Aggregate Results Advisory Group to the Minister of Education point to a lack of confidence in the standards and call for review processes to be implemented claims a spokesperson for the New Zealand Principals’ Federation.

The recommendations from the group, obtained by the Green Party under the Official Information Act, include making national standards reporting less regular, finding a credible authority to explain national standards, and not making the online Progress and Consistency Tool (PaCT) mandatory for schools.

Teaching professionals and school leaders have been calling for a full review of the hastily constructed standards for years and more recently gave the thumbs down to the mandating of PaCT, an online tool designed to make the national standards results more reliable.

Paul Drummond, New Zealand Principals’ Federation spokesperson, says it is clear that after three years of implementation the national standards are still not embedded and the profession has no confidence that they can make a difference for priority learners.

“The advisory group knows that and recommends that we should be investing in research and drawing on existing research to build knowledge about best practices for raising the achievement of priority groups,” he says.

“The advisory group agrees with us that PACT should not be mandatory. There is a high lack of trust throughout the profession about what national standards results will be used for in the future and these things have nothing to do with improving children’s learning,” says Drummond.