The Education Review Office has released a new Guide to Schools aimed at helping parents and whānau choose a school, understand how their child’s school is performing, ask the right questions and raise concerns when they need to.
ERO acting chief review officer Tim Fowler said more informed and engaged parents tended to help their children get more out of their schooling, which led to better long-term outcomes.
“ERO reviewers are in schools across the country every day and our researchers are analysing and reporting on what works and what doesn’t,” Fowler told RNZ. “We know that parent and whānau involvement in their children’s education makes a huge difference.”
The guide was developed and tested with parents and whānau across the country. Fowler said the feedback was consistent, with families saying they wanted to understand more about what makes a great school and how they could engage with the school when things were going well, and when they were not.
“We know that many parents and whānau want to be engaged in their child’s learning, but that they face barriers,” Fowler said. “They told us that they are worried about asking questions and need clearer information about what they can ask and who they should ask.”
Principals, in turn, told ERO that they welcomed parents being actively involved and would like parents to be better informed on how to approach schools constructively, Fowler said.
“Parents’ decisions and involvement with their child’s school makes a big difference. This guide will help parents talk to their child’s school, about what matters most,” he said.
The Guide to Schools sits alongside another major shift in how ERO reports back to families. The agency is rolling out a colour-coded four-point scale to grade school performance, with the Education Minister saying it will recognise successes rather than focus only on failure. The new scale replaces the older narrative-only review reports, which parents had often found difficult to compare from one school to the next.
The guide is being released against a backdrop of continued concern about a small but persistent group of struggling schools. Twenty-one recently published ERO reports flagged schools that needed either a statutory manager, a Crown-appointed commissioner or further guidance to lift performance. Those reports cover everything from governance breakdowns to attendance and achievement issues.
For most parents, however, the day-to-day worry is rarely whether their school is failing in a dramatic way. More often it is whether their child is making the progress they should be making, whether bullying is being handled properly, what the school is doing about attendance, and how decisions on streaming, reporting and homework are being made. The new guide is designed to give families the language and the confidence to put those questions to the school in a way that opens a conversation rather than shutting one down.
Engagement is a measurable factor in student achievement. Research summarised by the Ministry of Education has consistently found that children whose parents stay involved in their schooling, including by attending parent-teacher meetings, reading with them at home and turning up at school events, do better academically and stay engaged for longer. The ERO guide attempts to lower the barrier to that involvement, particularly for parents who did not have positive experiences with their own schooling, or who are not confident navigating the system in English.
ERO is the independent Crown agency that evaluates and reports on the education and care of children and young people in early learning services and in primary and secondary schools. Its reports are published online and have, for many years, been the main public window into how individual schools are performing. The new colour-coded scale and the parent guide are part of a wider push to make those reports easier for non-specialists to read.
The release also comes as the school sector continues to absorb a series of structural changes, including a tightened focus on attendance, the rollout of an hour a day each of reading, writing and maths in primary schools, and the move to a new common practice model for teaching. Schools have in some cases said the volume of change is hard to keep up with. ERO has framed the guide as a way of bringing parents into the conversation as those changes bed in, rather than leaving them watching from the sidelines.
Fowler said the agency wanted parents to feel they could turn up at the school gate, or pick up the phone, knowing what to ask. The guide covers practical situations including a child starting at a new school, a child struggling academically or socially, concerns about a teacher or principal, and how to read and use ERO’s published school reports.
The Guide to Schools is available free of charge on the ERO website.
What questions would you most want to ask your child’s school if you knew you would get a straight answer? Tell us in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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