The debate over National Standards continues to simmer away, but the conversation is changing. If you listen carefully there is no real opposition to the general concept of National Standards – which is the reporting of student progress to parents.

The main criticisms have been that National Standards were poorly communicated, and were rushed in off the back of an election promise without properly working through some legitimate concerns. As a result there has been little buy-in from quite an important group of people who are implementing the policy on the ground – you know, teachers.

This is particularly important in New Zealand, which has self-managing schools and highly autonomous teachers. Policies developed from central government must be managed very delicately. 

The Green Party this week obtained a report by an advisory group within the Ministry that recommends finding “a new ‘credible authority’ to explain the policy because the current ‘story’ about the standards is not believable.”

The story should be that the concept of National Standards is good, because it is vital that teachers discuss with parents how their children are doing in school. Dr Cam Calder, the committee chairman for a recently announced inquiry into engaging parents in their children’s education, says “the importance of parental engagement in children’s learning is well documented in national and international research”.

Communicating with parents where their children are at in the critical areas of literacy and numeracy should, in theory, be a platform for a conversation about what parents and teachers can do to help children progress. Yet the report notes that parents do not understand the results. Communication problems throughout have obstructed a potentially good policy.

Apart from that, legitimate concerns about National Standards were not ironed out before they were introduced. To touch on just one, opponents believe National Standards stigmatise children very early on, boxing them into categories of ‘at’, ‘above’ or ‘below’. The report recommends investigating the impact on children who are judged ‘below’.

But again, what this really comes down to is communication. Communicating progress need not be stigmatising. It takes a skilled teacher to be honest about where children are at and yet still be constructive about how to progress, regardless of whether the standards are reported in scores out of 100, grades from A to E, or words. Communication with parents is a challenging aspect of teaching, and this is not unique to New Zealand.

Teachers’ communication of National Standards to parents is essential to the effectiveness of the policy, but it is hard for teachers to tell a story they do not believe in.