Reporting requirements on schools will be changed to make them more useful in improving educational outcomes.

Education Minister Trevor Mallard said The Education Amendment Bill No.2, which will be introduced to Parliament before Christmas will propose a new system of public planning and reporting for schools.

"It will be simpler, more coherent, provide better information to parents, communities and government, while reducing much of the administrative drama of the current system," Trevor Mallard said.

"At the core of this new system will be a single, coherent plan that incorporates the school goal and purposes for the forthcoming year. This plan will ask schools to set out objectives and targets for student achievement. Helping students grow educationally is the most important thing a school can do so it seems strange we have never asked them to report on this before.

"At the end of each year, schools will be asked to report where the outcomes differed from their targets. That in itself will reduce workload. Schools will also be given templates – a framework for planning and reporting - so they are not wasting time inventing 2,700 different ways of packaging the information as they do at present.

"The new system for planning and reporting will also use internet and computer technology to simplify the transfer of information between schools and parents, and schools and the government.

"The purpose of school planning and reporting, should be to provide information to parents, communities and government that shows how schools plan to, and in turn how schools have succeeded, in affecting education outcomes for their students.

"The new system requires school boards to include objectives and targets for student achievement in their school plans and reports. For the first time school boards will place the same emphasis on non-financial reporting as they previously have on financial reporting.

"It will help improve student learning by enabling the Ministry of Education to extract considerably better information about school performance. This information can be fed back to schools who can then use it to benchmark their own performance as a basis for ongoing improvement.

"From a government perspective, we will be able to obtain better information on where Government policy is, or is not, being effectively implemented so that we can intervene sooner or adjust the policy earlier so that it has the desired outcomes.

"Getting better information is the key to maintaining public faith in the public education sector. By providing parents and taxpayers with good information they, like the Government, are in a better position to influence their neighbourhood school both as parents and as trustees of schools," Trevor Mallard said.

Ends

© Scoop Media