National Standards discriminate against students who speak English as a second language (ESOL) and make it impossible for schools to be compared, the principal of an Auckland school says.
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More than 60 per cent of students at Willowbank School, in the new relatively affluent eastern suburb of Dannemora, come to school with English as a second language. Some speak rudimentary English, while others do not have any English at all when they start at the 800-pupil school.
Principal Deidre Alderson said that despite this, the students were being compared with the rest of the country in reading, writing and maths in their first year of learning - before they had even been given the chance to catch up.
"They may not have mastered English yet and they are being measured against these standards," she said.
"We're not saying 'poor us', because we don't feel like that, but what we're saying is it's misleading to our community and unfair to our kids."
Parents of these students, who were mostly of Asian descent, would then become unnecessarily worried when they saw the word "below," on their child's report, and send them to one of dozens of "cram schools" in the area for after school tutoring.
Willowbank is a decile nine school in an area with a high percentage of Asian immigrants.
Alderson said she had implored Education Minister Hekia Parata to change the rules so that ESOL students were not measured against the standards until they had been at school for two years.
Parata had said that was unlikely to happen, the principal said.
"She just says 'We want that data'."
Within the school, the standards helped teachers with funding and resource planning, and organising how children should be grouped in classes.
Willowbank moderated its results with other schools in the area, to ensure assessments were at the same level.
But they were useless for comparative purposes, Alderson said.
More than a quarter of all students at the school had some kind of special need, whether it was a physical disability, dyslexia, or developmental difficulties. At the other end of the spectrum, there were also a number of gifted students.
"Because they are summative, they are just giving you end data if you like," Alderson said.
"But whether you can call them National Standards, we don't think so. The needs of children at our school are very different to a school in say, Invercargill.
"We have huge concerns."
As a parent, it was more important to ask questions about how well the needs and wellbeing of the individual child were being looked after, rather than judging based on a set of numbers, Alderson said.
Associate principal Lisa Banfield said that in the classroom, pupils kept track of their learning every day using series of stepping stones called "progressions".
National Standards were simply a measurement tool that showed if they had met the year level requirements, based on the progressions.