With all the hooha coming from some opposition corners that parents shouldn’t be able to know how their kids are performing at school with the introduction of National Standards, there is some interesting discussion on this going on in Australia. The Sydney Morning Herald has been running some good pieces this week around the launch of the brand new  MySchool website. It allows parents to review schools and for schools to learn from each other.  As a parent of two young kids I want to know as much as possible how my kids are doing. Every parent I know is the same. It seems that unions and the Labour Party in NZ don’t. Kindof ironic then that it is a Labor government in Australia who has just let Aussie parents find out. Why can’t Kiwis? National Standards in schools will allow us to once again play catchup.

In particular in Aussie this is what they are saying:

The My School site gives parents information, based on the national testing of children’s literacy and numeracy, known as NAPLAN. It tells parents about schools in their area, and about a group of comparable schools from around the nation where children come from similar socio-economic backgrounds. It is absurd that parents should be denied this information, or that all sorts of bogies are conjured about the dangers of making it easily available.

 Sounds great to me. In an article in the SMH today it also discusses the site see Aussie Schools already ahead of NZ and that the site was so popular with parents when it launched that it crashed!

If you enjoyed this post you might want to subscribe to our RSS Feed!