Undercover policies

As predicted, the National Party announced its education policies undercover of noise in the last days of the election campaign.

National appears to have recognised that its education policies are unpopular with voters (despite its rhetoric to the contrary) and kept well away from a meaningful debate on them.

In fact, one woman - the sister of an NZEI member - attended a meeting where Prime Minister John Key was speaking, and asked him about National Standards. He asked to speak to her after the meeting, clearly not keen to talk openly on this subject.

Key told her privately (all the real stuff seems to happen in 'private'!) that National hadn't been able to get traction on the policy, and it wasn't going well.

Nonetheless, National's education policy is based firmly and squarely on the standards. There are enough fishhooks in its rather bland wording to make it clear that standards are intended to drive the public education system.

All primary students will be covered by standards (including ESOL and special needs students, and there's a hint that years 9 and 10 will be covered too), a new online network will record all the data, and schools will be 'incentivised' by funding, according to their progress against the standards.

A promised review of the integrated-schools legislation could be code for any number of ghastly policies around 'free' schools.

At the same time, new templates out from the Ministry, on how schools should report to parents on their children, look remarkably like car WOF checklists.

Indeed, National's policy has an awful lot about standards, accountability, performance and incentives - and remarkably little about children and learning.