Ko Tainui te waka Ko Ngāti Raukawa ki Wharepūhunga te iwi Whetu Cormick
National President, New Zealand Principals’ Federation
With the first phase of the Tomorrow’s Schools Review now completed (see pp 5–16 in this issue for the NZPF Moot report), we turn our attention to another important topic. This is Curriculum, Progress and Achievement (CPA). A Ministerial Advisory Group (MAG) began working on CPA early last year. With the removal of national standards, we have the task of finding a different way to measure how our young people are progressing in their learning, so that teachers can identify next learning steps and can update parents on their children’s progress. At a national level, the public wants to know how the education system is doing across the board because it takes a significant investment of public money to operate the education system. We have no argument with these two requirements. The challenge is to identify how to do it. We come to this challenge leaving behind a competitive, economic model of education, where achievement targets, accountabilities compliance and data ruled everything we did. National standards were the lynch pin to make this model work. They were the ultimate measure of student performance, of teacher performance and of school performance. In the end, they measured how well the system was doing and how well an individual student was doing relative to the standards. The standards were the same for everybody so in this way students and schools could be directly compared. I am not going to launch an analysis of why national standards were utterly rejected by the profession because you are all quite familiar with the arguments. It is enough to say that after nine years they didn’t raise achievement levels. Nor did they make a jot of difference to Māori, Pasifika, young people with learning difficulties or those from disadvantaged backgrounds – the groups targeted for improvement. Unshackled from the restraints of national standards, there are principals and teachers who are struggling to identify an alternative way to measure learning progress. Couple that with the need to find a new way of reporting system progress and there is work to be done. For the past year our sector has been debating what sort of learning assessment we want and what would be needed to show parliament and the public how the system is performing at a national level. Some of the ideas include designing studentowned records of learning that capture rich learning, support transitions across schools and evaluate and communicate learning progress across the breadth of the New Zealand Curriculum (NZC) and Te Matauranga o Aotearoa. We want to talk about learning as a process not as outputs. Many of you are already doing this using e-portfolios and learning stories but there is no consistency across schools in these practices.
Consistency of practice is of course important, but neither do we want anything too prescriptive and certainly not standardised. We want learning progress to be student-owned and to include student voice. We want to focus on students’ strengths and build on these. We want whānau involved in developing and maintaining these learning records and contributing to them. It has been suggested that a single digital platform is needed to help with consistency and ease of communication, particularly when students transition. That of course raises more questions about the availability of technology to all. We would expect learning records would have qualitative and observational information but questions remain about how to measure the progress. We need our teachers and principals to be capable of gathering, analysing and using assessment information to support progress in learning; to undertake inquiry and be literate in those processes and the evaluation of them. To do this we need a selection of assessment tools, and readily available PLD. We also need the processes of inquiry and assessment to have greater emphasis in our Initial Teacher Education (ITE) programmes. What we don’t want is to be burdening our teachers with additional workload. Collaboration would help in leveraging expertise for developing the skills of inquiry and assessment for teachers in an area. Whether this is through Principals’ Associations’ networks, clusters, Communities of Learning or hubs, it would be helpful to work collaboratively to solve specific problems of practice. A further help would be the establishment of a curriculum, learning, assessment and pedagogy unit to support the work of our teachers. This has already been recommended in the Tomorrow’s Schools Review. At the recent NZPF executive committee meeting, CPA was discussed and members were quite clear that when we are considering the elements that influence young peoples’ learning we are talking about the effectiveness of our teachers in tandem with the culture of our schools. Members felt that issues such as cultural sustainability, collaborative practice, and overarching mechanisms for creativity all needed to be considered when assessing a school’s effectiveness for learning. CPA is a big task, and for some it is entering new territory. It is also hugely exciting to have the opportunity to shape a mechanism for developing our curriculum and assessing learning, which may endure for the next thirty years.
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