Letter to the Editor, Tuesday May 3, 2016

Told you so

News that thousands of children start secondary school every year without the reading , writing or maths skills they need is not mind-boggling to me.

Before a child can understand and carry out numeracy they need to spend a heap of time manipulating equipment and talking about it.

Before a child can read or write they need to have oracy. Before they can have oracy they need to have lots of experiences provided by home and if not home by schools, to enable them to develop oracy skills, and from that to begin to develop writing and reading skills.

It is not mind blowing. It is basic Piaget.

Now the Minister says it will all be fixed by her latest idea, Community of Schools. Now we have Dr Graeme Stoop, who toured te Tai Tokerau enforcing national standards, saying they haven't worked, but schools working together are the answer!

How many more years? How many more years of fear about national standards stopping authentic learning? How many more careers destroyed because people have had the professional responsibility to say it's cuckoo. How many more ideas plucked more from political ideology than educational will kids have to put up with?

National standards have not worked anywhere in the world where they have been implemented. Now New Zealand is showing exactly the same. If the $300 million-plus spent on them had been used to actually target and help schools to do what we know needs happening we might just have more kids learning successfully.

By the way, am I biased against national standards? Too right.

PAT NEWMAN

President

Te Tai Tokerau Principals' Assn