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An assessment expert says the government's shift to a single maths and literacy testing system for primary schools is significant and could lead to league tables.
The Education Ministry has called for proposals for a test that will run twice a year for children in Years 3-10.
That surprised the Principals Federation, which said it had been told schools could choose between the two most widely-used assessment systems, e-asTTle (electronic assessment Tool for Teaching and learning) and PATs (Progressive Assessment Tests).
However, the ministry told RNZ e-asTTle was not fit for the job due to technical limitations and a poor match between its content and changes to the school curriculum.
Auckland University education professor Gavin Brown helped develop e-asTTle in the 1990s but ceased involvement with the project 20 years ago.
Brown, who is director of the university's Quantitative Data Analysis and Research Unit, told RNZ updating e-asTTle would probably be more expensive than purchasing a new test system.
However, Brown said a big driver for developing a new system might be to ensure the ministry had greater control over the tests and the results.
"I suspect the real reason is to do with who controls the data. E-asTTle and PAT data belong to schools. They do not belong to the government and therefore the government can't use that data to make policy or changes. If it's centrally controlled, they own the data and they can use it for their own, governmental purposes," he said.
Brown said he was not convinced the government needed a new, compulsory test.
"It's a considerably large change in the sense that it's a reversion back to the compulsory reporting of national standards by schools to parents under the previous National government.
"Plus, it's a move away from standardised testing for diagnostic formative purposes to an accountability test in which the nature of the test and the use of the test data is controlled by the central agency rather than kept at the school level," he said.
Brown said one advantage of a central test was that the ministry could match results with government data about children's health and socio-economic background to pinpoint areas that needed more attention.
He said a central test could also be used to measure whether the government's new maths and literacy policies were working.
"On the downside, once information is owned by the government, it is public information. So under the Official Information Act, it will need to be exposed, which means that twice a year schools could be ranked by external agencies like the news media to say this is the best performing school," Brown said.
He said such comparisons were unfair because they did not account for differences in children's socio-economic backgrounds which had a big effect on their achievement.
Brown said a good test should help teachers understand where pupils were struggling and what they needed to learn next.
But he said some centrally-provided tests in other countries did not provide results to teachers for several months, so they were of little use for assisting teachers in their work.
"Because we're talking about every kid in grades three to 10 being tested in the same two-week block on three subjects, it's a lot of tests.
"Now if they've got a machine that can score automatically, the feedback should get to the teachers reasonably quickly before the kid has moved on. But traditionally elsewhere in the world, like the Australian Naplan it takes three months to score the tests and if it's run at the end of the year, by the time the report comes back to the school and the teachers, the kids have already moved on a grade or even changed schools," he said.
