NSSAG Work Programme

The work programme of NSSAG has three major components that jointly aim at:

1. Mobilising the wisdom, knowledge and experience of the sector for solving issues in the use of national standards to improve student achievement across the New Zealand Curriculum;
2. Treating the evolution of the National Standards initiative as a learning experience, one characterised by continual improvement.

1. Understanding the standards

The principle concern is to attract the confidence of the sector both in NSSAG and in the process of change being experienced in the education sector.

There is general agreement that the National Standards initiative is part of an evolution in which the implementation of the New Zealand Curriculum is central, and in part a specific project whose introduction surprised many in the sector. There is disagreement about the relative weight of the two components.

NSSAG role

To help ensure that the National Standards initiative is not seen as a discrete policy imposed on the school system, but an instrument for gaining the best possible outcome in student achievement from the New Zealand curriculum.

The first step is to get from those who developed the standards a description of how they used current educational understanding and data on student performance to turn the notions of levels implicit in the curriculum into explicit national standards.

Specific, but not exclusive questions to be addressed include:

1. Where did the link to NCEA level 2 come from?
2. There have also been questions of the feasibility of the standards –are they intended to set an objective of enhanced student performance, not merely record the performance of students relative to the average of what is currently achieved?
3. Is it reasonable that “mathematics for living”, for example, now requires greater capability than was formerly the case, because managing greater life expectancy requires financial literacy, and desired citizen engagement in relation to climate change and other social issues requires understanding risk in the sense of mathematical capability.
4. How has the mathematics teaching community resolved the debate about the relative weight to be attached to mathematical processes and subject content in explaining how statements of the mathematics standards are to be understood and applied?

Overtime NSSAG meetings will have new information about the feasibility and effectiveness of specific standards arising from Professional Development experience and from the exchange of school experiences on the interactive moderation website facility.

2. Data

The National Standards initiative has to be developed within the current requirements of the Official Information Act.

There is general support for the notion that teachers and educational institutions should not escape accountability. However, the meaning of such assurances is far from obvious. Accountability is neither a heavy handed response to poor performance nor the belief that everyone should be satisfied that unilateral assertions of conscientious effort are sufficient for all purposes. Accountability is a conceptual structure that requires agreement between two or more parties to a statement of objectives, agreement to a process by which the achievement of those objectives is to be monitored and assessed, and a mutual understanding of the sanctions or rewards that flow from achievement of the objectives. It is within the deeper meaning of “accountability” that use of the data resulting from the National Standards initiative should be considered.

The notion of a learning experience or continual improvement is fundamental. The initial data flowing from teacher assessment of student performance in relation to National Standards will not instantaneously be perfect. A reasonable expectation is that it should improve over time.

There will need to be corrections to ill-informed commentators who think that the data from National Standards will immediately identify “failing” schools and incompetent teachers.

The National Standards initiative is not a performance appraisal mechanism. The data may indeed be used as a diagnostic tool within a school but it cannot do more than identify an issue to be investigated. The important point is that staff appraisal is not the aspect of accountability for which the National Standards initiative is relevant. National Standards are about student achievement, and within that about establishing objectives, monitoring their achievement, and responding to what we learn about achievement.

A major concern is “league tables”. Over time and with experience concern about league tables may diminish and use of National Standards data will be sound. That happened with publication of ERO reports and with NCEA results. Neither of these was entirely parallel but both provide some relevant information. ERO reports did not directly feature individual teachers, and schools had an opportunity to give a simultaneous explanation of how they proposed to address identified issues. NSSAG might well explore whether it is possible to learn from the latter point, but it is worth remembering that in the early 1990s, there were fears that publication of ERO reports would be disastrous for collaborative teaching. Even later, the publication of the initial ERO report on Mangere-Otara was widely condemned whereas now Strengthening Education in Mangere and Otara (SEMO) is equally widely considered to be a success. In the case of NCEA, there were concerns that additional information would exacerbate the erroneous inferences that had been drawn from data resulting from School Certificate and University Bursary examinations, but the bigger point was that teachers who had accumulated considerable skill in predicting to parents results in those examinations had no such skill in predicting NCEA results.

This might suggest to NSSAG that additional experience could generate greater confidence in providing overall teacher judgments and relieve some of the current anxiety. However, it is clear that some worries are widespread and deeply-held, and accelerating their resolution is very much to be desired.

Overall teacher judgments on individual students will be needed for teachers and parents (and are protected by standard privacy considerations). Schools will need to know how they will use data for planning their own curriculum development and professional development. ERO will need to define what data it will use as it assesses the self-appraisal processes of schools and conducts other aspects of its reviews. It is likely also to need to define what data will be sought for national evaluation reports. Schools and the Ministry will need to jointly define what data will be used for intra- and inter-school development of robust processes for making and monitoring overall teacher judgments. (It may be that schools will form clusters for which the data will be relevant, but an interactive website has obvious attractions for disseminating and even creating knowledge and would probably make the idea of “sealed” clusters impracticable.) The Ministry will need to define what data will be needed to enable it to target resources so as to have the greatest impact on student achievement. A disaggregated approach such as this might alleviate some fears about possible misuse of data. It should be realised, however, that a determined media or other commentators could pursue data at school level and aggregate it however it wishes.

NSSAG role

1. Administration of the Official Information Act is essentially managed by the Office of the Ombudsmen. The Ombudsmen have taken a demanding approach to claims that data is still under active use. The fundamental purpose of the Act, to progressively make information available so as to assist citizens to participate in their governance, would be frustrated if the Ombudsmen allowed claims that actions now will not be completed until many years into the future. Similarly, there is no basis for claims that official information can be withheld simply because it is research data.
2. The NSSAG should seek to shift the debate to a less generalized treatment of “data”.
3. NSSAG should ask for an analysis of exactly what data is needed where in order to achieve the objectives of the National Standards initiative.
4. NSSAG may be able to suggest ways of monitoring data improvement and indicating the speed at which it can reasonably be expected to occur.

3.  Using standards to enhance student achievement

The trust and cooperation of the sector will be promoted by a confident belief that the National Standards are not simply a device for categorising students by levels of performance, let alone categorising schools by the extent to which they “succeed”, but are an instrument for enhancing student achievement. How teachers, parents and other stakeholders respond to the information made available through National Standards is much more important than the information itself.

NSSAG role

1. NSSAG will want to be informed about, and to comment on, Ministry plans for the formation and utilisation of the Student Achievement Function resources.
2. NSSAG will also want to know about evolving plans for Professional Development resources.
3. NSSAG will want to initiate discussion of how National Standards are being accommodated in Initial Teacher Education and in the activities of the various educational and professional bodies most involved in that.
4. NSSAG will want to be informed about experience in the sector in using National Standards to identify learning issues (individual or at various levels of aggregation) and ability to recruit enhanced capability to deal with them.

Gary Hawke
Chair
National Standards Sector Advisory Group