Call for trials supported | Wairarapa News | Local News in Wairarapa

Touring primary teachers' union field officers say Wairarapa parents, teachers, principals and school board members are near unanimous in their support for trialling the Government's national standards before they are implemented.
New Zealand Educational Institute (NZEI) tour co-ordinator Lyndy McIntyre said Wairarapa stakeholders almost universally agreed on one thing _ that the legislation was being pushed through too quickly.
She said Wairarapa school communities mirrored the rest of the country with ''rock-solid support'' for testing the standards before they were fully implemented. ''They've confirmed very much that Wairarapa's on the same wavelength as the rest of New Zealand,'' Ms McIntyre said. ''What has come through is that there's quite a low level of understanding of what the standards are all about.'' She said the institute was looking at holding a community forum in Wairarapa in May to give parents, families and the wider community the chance to debate how national standards would impact on children's learning. ''Our main concern is that this has been hugely rushed and the implementation of national standards has left communities behind in what is probably the biggest change in education in the past 20 years,'' Ms McIntyre said.
Educational institute field officer Denise Cornford was also on the whistlestop Wairarapa tour and said all primary schools in Wairarapa were identifying struggling pupils and ''already assessing children's progress against national norms''.
Ms McIntyre also criticised the Government for failing to answer how it would ''lift the tail'' of the 20 per cent of students who were failing and warned that national standards could create unfair perceptions of schools with media-driven ''league tables'' and ''pit schools against one another'', leading to an educational culture of ''teaching to the test''.
The educational institute says national standards have failed in other countries and New Zealand children fare academically well compared with pupils overseas. Ms McIntyre said the narrow focus on literacy and numeracy was to the detriment of pupils who had ''talents and strengths in other parts of the curriculum'' and that labelling them failures would erode their desire to learn. The tour visited Masterton's Lakeview, Douglas Park and St Patrick's Schools as well as Carterton School and Southend School, talking to parents, principals, teachers and school board members and gathering signatures calling for trials of the standards.