Maharey aims to dispel 'urban myth' of schoolchildren's failure

Education Minister Steve Maharey is welcoming an inquiry into pupil achievement, saying it will dispel an "urban myth" sparked by one of his own agency's reports that one in five schoolchildren are failing.

As the Education Review Office asks schools to prove they are helping struggling pupils, a parliamentary committee is putting its spotlight on the agency and how it determines student "failure and success".

The ERO said in its annual report last year that although New Zealand's top students were on a level with the best in the world, there was a large group at the bottom of the system - as many as one in five children or 153,000 - who were not succeeding.

The figure prompted the agency to move towards adopting the new evaluation requiring schools to demonstrate that steps were being taken with struggling students, which will form part of all school reviews by next month.

But Parliament's education and science committee is not convinced by ERO's figures and is now to conduct an inquiry into how it determines if the system is working for children.

Committee chairman Brian Donnelly said yesterday the ERO had come before the committee late last year and when questioned about how it had reached the 20 per cent figure "they fluffed around, they couldn't really say".

It was now a widely held view that a fifth of New Zealand students were failing, yet there appeared to be no data to back it up or disprove it.

"We are trying to get to the bottom of what we are talking about when we say these things. If the ERO doesn't know, then what are they actually basing their statements on?"

Mr Maharey yesterday praised ERO chief executive Mike Hollings, saying he was one of the country's best civil servants.

But he was concerned there was "a general impression about ... that there is a crisis in education" - an urban myth partly generated by the way the comments were interpreted.

"The figure took on a reality of its own. One in five children in New Zealand is not failing and once Mike Hollings is back in front of that select committee, which is where I hope they will start ... [it will become clear] that he didn't actually mean there was one in five kids in New Zealand failing."

"I think Mike would want to say, 'Look, you've got the wrong end of what we wanted to say'.

"He was talking about a group of kids who weren't doing as well as we would like them to" but that didn't mean they were failing.

It was impossible to give black and white figures on issues as complex as assessing school performance, as some children performed well in some areas and required more support in others, Mr Maharey said.

He believed the inquiry would shed further light on what was "one of the best systems in the world".

Mr Donnelly said the committee wanted to know how the system defined and measured success.

While there was a large gap between high and low achievers in New Zealand, a number of the latter group were doing better than average achievers in other countries, which raised questions about how their performance was rated.