I have spent a lot of time in schools and with parents and teachers since becoming an MP (and indeed beforehand).  There is one thing I can say with certainty. I am yet to meet a parent or teacher who did not want the children they care for or teach to progress, succeed and fulfil their potential.

In that light what is disappointing to me in the debate about National Standards is that the National Party and its cheerleaders are trying to create the impression that schools and teachers have no idea how children are progressing and are somehow deliberately hiding this from parents.

Take this from Richard Long, former National Party Chief of Staff in the Dominion Post this morning.

I can’t help but feel sorry for Education Minister Anne Tolley as she valiantly battles away on this one. It would, after all, be easier to abandon the field to the teachers’ union, as previous governments have done, continuing to leave pupils and their parents in the dark over performance and standards.

What utter nonsense. The notion of “the field being abandoned to the teachers union” is reds under the beds stuff. In the last government Labour implemented ASttLE a world leading assessment system, along with massive investment in literacy and numeracy programmes and professional development. We wanted and still want parents and teachers to have quality information about how their children are progressing.

Further, pupils and parents are most certainly not “in the dark over performance and standards”. I am not sure if Richard Long has been near a school lately, but I have, and most every school has robust assessment and reporting practices. The schools I deal with are also all extremely open to parents talking with them regularly about their children’s progress, and working out how they can help with it.

Of course there are some schools that could do better- and much more importantly there are children who are not achieving their potential. The National Party is fond of quoting the statistic that 1 in 5 children leave school without the literacy and numeracy skills they need. That is a bad thing. But what teachers tells us is that we know who those children are from an early stage. Shouldn’t we be focusing on those children and improving their progress, than implementing an unproven blunt instrument such as national standards?

At the very least something that the National Party see as the most important issue in education deserves a trial period. National pushed this through under urgency to meet their 100 days of action programme. This meant it did not get the scruitiny it deserved then, and that has still not occured.