Barry Soper: ZB senior political correspondent on the Government introducing standardised testing to primary schools

The Government is set to introduce standardised tests to ensure primary schoolers meet the right standards academically. 

Phonics checks will start for new students as young as five next year, and become compulsory from 2026.

Progress on reading, writing and maths progress for years 3 to 8 will also be monitored twice a year.

ZB senior political correspondent Barry Soper voices his approval for these new measures.

LISTEN ABOVE

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Barris Per senior political correspondence with US Now Barry.

Speaker 2 (00:02):
Hello, good afternoon, Hea.

Speaker 1 (00:03):
When you were at school two hundred years ago, did
you have to do testing? When you were at primary.

Speaker 2 (00:07):
School, we did testing all the time and had report
cards all the time. And most common line that was
used for me is and I can't never understand why
I was is doing well but could do better?

Speaker 1 (00:21):
And did your mum look at that and think, oh jeez,
I need to try with that one? Just go on
your own themail.

Speaker 2 (00:27):
Well, I can't remember, but I think I did better.
I'm not sure, but I think it's a great idea.
I mean, from next year, all kids with the their
first year of schooling will have to run through a
phonics test that'll help teachers understand how well kids can
read by sounding out letters after twenty weeks of schooling,

(00:51):
and it'll be repeated after forty weeks, so that's in
their first year. I think these are great moves and
they should have been in place I think long before now,
because we haven't really known as parents how well our
kids are doing progressively at school. There will be progression
on monitoring of reading, writing, and maths, and that'll be

(01:13):
introduced for years three to eight, which is good at
you yawning, hither, that's a bit boring for you.

Speaker 1 (01:21):
No, sorry, oh my gosh, not for on air, what's
carry on?

Speaker 2 (01:27):
Yeah, And so it'll basically essentially help teachers understand how
well the kid's doing, not only them, but they'll be
able to pass it on to the parents, and then
the parents will be able to take hopefully some sort
of remedial action at home to make sure their kids
keep up. And the objective, of course.

Speaker 1 (01:46):
Is to so the teacher can right, because it will
also identify for the teacher who's falling behind.

Speaker 2 (01:51):
Well, that too, and the government strategist get eighty percent
of students at curriculum level by the time they reach
high school. Now, of course, labors come out. And Jan Tinetti,
who used to be a school teacher, she described the
announcement as a step, a backward step for education, saying

(02:13):
that a number of students would be left behind. Well
that maybe the case. One would hope that the parents
would try and ensure that doesn't happen, but she said
that Erica Stanford has hell bent on one size fits
all in the education system. Well, isn't that what education's
about is to make one size even be better than.

Speaker 3 (02:35):
All I was hoping to address I am going to
address this later in the show, actually, but I really
keen to know what you think about this story that
emerged on news Hub last night. It had also been
on Newsroom a couple of weeks ago about David Seymour
apparently getting in trouble for messaging kids eight years ago
on Snapchat.

Speaker 2 (02:52):
My blood ran cold, and I thought, honestly, the thing
that I think annoyed me more than anything else was
the mother that said that there should be guidelines around
how politicians communicate directly with young people on social media.
Now the mother was blurred out, so she didn't have

(03:13):
the courage of the convictions to come forward and say
what she found. And then the kids, similarly, they were
now older of course, because this was this occurred in
twenty and sixteen, and it was at a point, I
might say, when Snapchat was very much the vogue social

(03:33):
media go to platform, and the Act Party in twenty
twenty spent quite a lot of money with Snapchat for
their election campaign. So it was only right that David
Seymour was on Snapchat, and it was so innocent and
what it denoted was, well, what it suggested luridly was

(03:55):
that David Seymour in some way was grooming young kids.
They loved getting a reply from a politician totally innocently.
It's telling them to look after themselves. I just think
it's disgraceful that the news Hub, in the last week
of its operation, came out with a story like this,

(04:17):
as though it's a damning story for politicians. Chris Bishop
was accused similarly back in two thousand and eighty of
replying to messages from kids. Well, you know, school kids
do go on to vote and they say, but an
adult male politician. I wonder if it's a female politician
that had replied, if it was Julianne Genter replying to.

Speaker 1 (04:41):
School women aren't creeps?

Speaker 2 (04:44):
Oh is that right?

Speaker 1 (04:46):
That's well, that's the common trope, isn't it.

Speaker 2 (04:47):
Well it is.

Speaker 1 (04:48):
Hey, very quickly, what's Shane Jones up to now?

Speaker 2 (04:51):
Well, Shane Jones is furious. He had some family competing
in a Kapa Haka Secondary school's competition last week and
he's furious because he, like a number of New Zealanders,
can speak Maori and listened to the waiatas that came
with these competing schools. Yeah, and he said that he's

(05:14):
convinced that essentially the Kapa haka tutors conditioning these kids
to be anti government. And unfortunately, I said to show
Shane earlier today, I was talking to him and said
I'd like the English translation of some of these wayata
by this time that were on air. He hadn't been

(05:38):
able to come back to me meetings most of the day,
but I'll no doubt see them what the interpretation was.
But it goes back, I guess to the hakka the
women performed with Pride and Wellington. I think it was
wasn't it that they were anti government as well? And honestly,
let kids make up the Roman. I'll tell you one

(05:58):
thing that he was furious at was that the screaming
across Parliament and essentially it's a well known Maldi urn
that Maldi blood has wasted on you. What he was
furious that was Parliament's youngest MP, Hannah Raffiti. No, my

(06:18):
Pie Clark, she's only she was born in two thousand
and two, so she's twenty two. She screamed at Winston
Peters that term that Maldi blood was wasted on him,
and he said that is totally offensive to a man
in his late seventies from a twenty two year.

Speaker 1 (06:33):
Old Barry Thank you, Barry Sober, Senior political correspondence.

Speaker 2 (06:37):
For more from Heather Duplessy Allen Drive, listen live to
news Talks.

Speaker 3 (06:40):
It'd be from four pm weekdays, or follow the podcast
on iHeartRadio