Website confirmed for national standards data

Education Minister Hekia Parata will release information today on what form the online data will take. Photo / APN

National standards data, Education Review Office reports, school annual reports and NCEA data will be made available publicly on the Education Ministry's website, Education Minister Hekia Parata announced today.

National Standards data, reported for the first time this year, would be published from September and would begin being loaded on the website from today.

The data, to be put on the ministry's Education Counts website, would allow parents to see how their child's school was performing and allow the Government to see how well the system was doing.

Ms Parata acknowledged that the data was variable.

"It is the first year, and no consistent format was required so that was to be expected. It can only get better and better - both in quality and its use over time - and we want to work with schools to do this," she said.

Better public information was part of the Government's five-year plan for education.

"Having robust, quality data that helps us all to understand and support a student's learning is one of the ways we are working to achieve this, and this is a key feature of high performance education systems internationally," Ms Parata said.

The five-year plan includes:

* Clear annual outcomes for learners, parents, teachers, boards of trustees and education sector agencies

* Consistent reporting format, by whole school and by year level

* Revised timelines that better reflect the planning, reporting, and delivery cycles for the school calendar year

* Achievement milestones and targets that work towards the Government's Better Public Service target of 85 per cent of 18-year-olds achieving NCEA Level 2 or equivalent in 2017

* Aligned professional learning and development, and other support tools and services to assist schools

The plan reflected the principles endorsed by the Ministerial Cross Sector Forum, Ms Parata said.

The concept of using a website with information for parents has come from the Australian Curriculum Assessment Authority's My Schools website.

On it parents can view how many students are enrolled at a school, attendance rates, student-teacher ratios, total income of the school, and achievement rates in reading, writing and maths.

The controversial national standards policy for collecting data on achievement was introduced by National last term.

Last month Prime Minister John Key said the national standards data the ministry had collected from schools was "too ropey" to provide to parents and more time was needed to create something more coherent.

Labour has said that making "league tables" available would give parents a blurred picture of achievement, given the data collected by the ministry had been patchy.

It was recently revealed in an Education Review Office report that one in five primary and intermediate schools were not fully implementing national standards in reading, writing and maths.

Green Party co-leader Metiria Turei said it was irresponsible to publish the information knowing it is inaccurate and unreliable.

"Many schools doing good work may be undermined by the release of inaccurate information. This is not fair to children, teachers or schools,'' she said.

"It is also disingenuous for Ms Parata to state that schools will not be compared with each other in league table fashion.''

Ms Turei said people will take the data uploaded on the Ministry of Education's website and make judgement calls based on the data.