About six months ago, I blogged on this site about the release of the Government's National Standards testing plans for primary school children. Back then I labelled my blog 'teaching to the test' which is exactly what National Standards represents or as one commentator described it  "NCEA for five year olds." Now everything is being readied to put our kids to the test. However, the first failure has already been detected - that of Education Minister Anne Tolley.

It's not me who has made this judgement - the PM has. In his first mini-reshuffle last week, Tolley had the Tertiary Education portfolio stripped from her. John Key has now passed the tertiary portfolio over to this government's Mr Fixit, Steven Joyce. Obstensibly, Key left Tolley at the Education Ministry so she could concentrate on the implementation and selling of National Standards. Tolley now has a hard job in front of her on both counts.

This will be the case as this first week of the school year will witness the lauch of the New Zealand Educational Institute (NZEI - the primary teacher's union) campaign against National Standards. The campaign will focus on the multiple downsides of national testing regimes including that they demoralise already poor learners, reinforce educational inequalities, increase teacher workloads and place high costs on often poorly resourced schools. Nearly all state primary school principals and boards of trustees have come out against the plan and educational academics have warned that unless the standards are piloted first, implementation will be impossible.

In response, Anne Tolley and her Education Ministry officials are preparing to engage in an election-style counter-campaign to sell the reforms. This is reminiscent of David Lange's campaign to sell the Tomorrow's Schools reforms of the Fourth Labour Government (and I remember this campaign well as I attended a high school which Lange visited at the time as part of it). Twenty years on, Tomorrow's Schools is still in place and Tolley will be hoping to replicate the success of that earlier propaganda campaign.

The key audience of the both the government's and the union's campaigns will be parents. I can well imagine that the main target group for the government will be swinging middle class parents who helped put National over the top in 2008. While the Minister and her officials will deny this, we will likely see television pictures of Tolley meeting with middle class parents in nice, reasonably well resourced schools with pleasant, smiley well fed kids. In other words, her media and political minders will be telling her to steer clear of lower decile schools which will be the most adversely impacted by the new standards.

Furthermore, there is growing international evidence that national testing regimes are a failure. In the United Kingdom, the Labour Government there imposed national testing. This has caused teachers and principals alike to revolt against high workloads. Besides, no noticable improvement in academic achievement has been recorded there. In Australia, the Federal Labor Government under their Deputy Prime Minister and Education Minister Julia Gillard is at the centre of a united teacher/principal campaign against the imposition of similar standards there. With those two examples in mind, it's no wonder that the New Zealand Labour Party are doing the right thing in not seeking to follow in the footsteps of their fellow social democratic parties by agreeing to national testing. It is well known that in New Zealand teachers are a core Labour voting group and any move by the party to support testing would make it more difficult for them next year.

For all the above reasons, Anne Tolley and the National Party (along with Act) could be on their own when it comes to National Standards. It will be ordinary parents who have the final say. From what I can see, the next D grade might be handed out to the National Government as a whole for introducing a scheme that's failed elsewhere.