Stuff publishes the National Standards data

First the criticism by the NZEI:

So, what will National Standards league tables actually tell you?  Not much.  In fact, they will be very misleading if you are using them to judge school effectiveness.

They won’t tell you the level of improvement of children at a school, nor how engaged or happy individual children are, whether the school is meeting the individual children’s needs and whether the teachers are inspiring them.

Actually they will, eventually. Sure the first year is static data, but what I will find fascinating is the change over time. As for the other stuff, yes national standards data is only one piece of data. The answer is to supply more data, not less.

John Hartevelt who was the project manager for the project responds:

Many people told us not to publish the information you see on this site.

They fought to stop us. Some sent us bills for the privilege of their school’s data. Others buried the figures we asked for in complex matrices and pages of indecipherable bumph.

Well done on Fairfax for persevering.

Anyone who read the National Standards results as a proxy for quality would be quite foolish. We wouldn’t do that and we don’t suggest you do, either. For starters, they are not moderated, so one school’s “well below” may be another’s “at” or “above”. There is just no way of knowing – yet – exactly how the standards have been applied across schools.

But even if they were moderated, the standards alone could not tell you everything about how a school is doing by its pupils. As many of the experts we canvassed for this project have noted, quality is most evident in what a school does to push its pupils up, not in how well they do at attracting the brainiest, most-privileged kids in the first place.

Absolutely.

Our data handling processes have been checked by independent experts. Every school page includes decile, roll and funding statistics and a link to the school’s latest Education Review Office report. We have reported in detail across the country on a range of schools to help show that there is more to any of them than the numbers you see on this site. And we have commissioned a range of views on National Standards to debate the issue in their own words.

The link to the ERO reports is useful.

My old school is Island Bay School. I lived near St Francis De Sales and the local Intermediate was South Wellington.

Island Bay is decile 10 (which surprises me), St Francis decile 9 South Wellington decile 7. A comparison of the three is here. A very easy to comprehend format.