Peter Garrett: encouraging signs (a Kiwi perspective)

It could be an encouraging sign for generations of Australian children.

But no!

It's so you can allocate extra support. Well fair enough, I suppose. Mind you, it would have been a lot simpler and cheaper just to ask teachers to send in requests for extra teacher aide support for those struggling children.

(Imaginary interlocution: What's that? It won't be in the form of teacher aides but some kind of advisory support: education functionaries peddling the official, standardised, generalised line. That's what we have too.)

Then you deliver:

'In reading and numeracy, across all year levels, an average of 93.77 per cent of students are achieving at or above the national minimum standard, up from the average of 93.4 per cent in 2010.'

Or do you?

.4?

I think we'll leave it there, and try somewhere else for those elusive encouraging signs.

Pete's media release was in response to the auditor-general's release of his report. Perhaps the encouraging signs could be there.

Para 34: An audit office 'analysis of NAPLAN data from 2008 to 2011 indicates that the LNNP is yet to make a statistically significant improvement, in any state, on the average NAPLAN results of schools that received LNNP funding, when compared to schools that did not receive funding.'

'In 2008, there was a significant gap between the proportion of indigenous achievement and non-indigenous in reading, writing and numeracy … as measured by NAPLAN in 2011, there continued to be a significant gap.'