Новая Зеландия вводит обязательные стандартизированные тесты для всех школ

Every primary and intermediate school in New Zealand will have to run standardised progress tests twice a year under a policy the Government confirmed this week, a change ministers say will finally give parents an honest picture of how their children are learning and one the country’s largest education union says drags the system back to a failed experiment. Prime Minister Christopher Luxon and Education Minister Erica Stanford announced the plan on 3 July during a visit to Silverstream School in Upper Hutt. From this year schools must assess students in Years 3 to 8 against a nationally consistent standard, using either the long-running Progressive Achievement Tests or the e-asTTle tool that many teachers already reach for. Younger children will sit phonics screening checks, and the results feed into a new monitoring system the Government calls SMART. The two check-ins are timed to line up with the mid-year and end-of-year reports that families receive. Speaking to media at the school, Luxon argued that achievement in New Zealand classrooms had slipped below what the country should accept and that the reforms were about facing that squarely. He said the changes were “evidence-based” and told reporters that “under our Government, that changes”. Stanford framed the shift as the start of nationally consistent assessment and reporting in primary and intermediate schools, and said it would give parents a clearer view of where their child sits and whether they are making progress. She stressed that the SMART tool was not designed to replace teacher judgement, with teachers continuing to draw on classroom work, observation and their own assessments. The testing regime sits alongside a wider set of education changes the Government has been rolling out through the year, including an hour a day each of reading, writing and maths, a move to structured literacy, and a curriculum rewrite. Ministers have repeatedly pointed to international measures showing a long decline in the share of New Zealand students meeting expected levels in reading, maths and science, and have made lifting those results a signature promise heading into the November election. You can compare where the parties stand on education and other issues using the free Newswire voting tool. Not everyone is convinced the tests will do what the Government hopes. NZEI Te Riu Roa, the union that represents most primary teachers and principals, called the announcement a backwards step and said running standardised tests twice a year for young children was not the way to lift achievement. The union argued that piling more testing onto children whose learning needs are already going unmet would only add anxiety, and that a national bank of comparable scores risks being turned into school league tables and the kind of streaming that sorts children by ability and can entrench disadvantage. The chair of the union’s Principals’ Council, Stephanie Madden, said the SMART tool had been rushed and raised questions about whether it was ready for classrooms. She said principals wanted watertight guarantees on how children’s data would be stored and used, so that results could not be scraped together into public rankings of schools. Teachers, the union said, should be the ones deciding which strategies work for the children in front of them. The debate carries a long memory. National Standards, introduced by the previous National-led government in 2010, required schools to rate students against set benchmarks in reading, writing and maths and to report those judgements to parents. Critics said the data was inconsistent, that it fuelled unofficial league tables in the media, and that it narrowed teaching to what was being measured. The Labour-led government scrapped National Standards in 2017 soon after taking office. The union’s warning this week is, in effect, that the new tests risk repeating that history under a different name, while the Government insists the tools are more robust and the reporting more useful to families. There is a clear political edge to all of this. Education has become one of the Government’s central pitches for re-election, with Luxon and Stanford presenting a run of announcements on curriculum, literacy, attendance and now assessment as proof that a coalition elected on lifting standards is delivering. For the Government, being able to show parents a simple, comparable measure of progress is part of the appeal. For its opponents and for the unions, that same simplicity is the danger, because a single number can flatten the messy reality of how a child actually learns. What happens next will play out in staffrooms as much as in Parliament. Schools are being asked to fold the new checks into their existing reporting from this year, which means the practical test of the policy will be whether teachers find the tools genuinely useful or simply another compliance task. Parents, meanwhile, will start seeing progress data land in their children’s reports and will form their own view about whether it tells them anything they did not already know. Do you think twice-yearly standardised tests will help lift achievement in New Zealand schools, or do they risk bringing back league tables and extra pressure on children? We would love to hear from teachers, parents and students. Share your thoughts in the comments below.