achievement data) and now form part of the Government’s wider data dissemina-
tion approach, the Public Achievement Information (PAI) pipeline.
Many, probably most, New Zealand primary teachers and principals were
opposed to the introduction of National Standards for primary school achievement
at the outset and as noted already, the NZEI and NZPF ran a major campaign
against them when they were introduced in 2010. Despite this, and without much
monitoring pressure from Government, by 2013 there was a shift towards the
National Standards. The author’s research (Thrupp and White 2013 ) has suggested
several reasons for this. First, problems within the policy were disguised by
components that teachers were connecting to previous practice without acknowl-
edging the new‘high stakes’use of these practices in the National Standards.
Second, National Standards intersected with a culture of commitment to high
expectations and constant improvement so that the perspective essentially became
that‘if we are going to do the Standards we are going to do them really well, in the
same way we do our best at everything else’. Third, there was a loyalty to one’s
own particular school: that our school is‘boxing clever’or, as one teacher in the
study put it, has‘nice’National Standards compared to other schools.
27.4.3 Investing in Educational Success
A school clusters policy,‘Investing in Educational Success’(IES) was introduced
in 2014 and has also been controversial within the education sector. Supporters of
the IES have seen it as new education spending on a relatively benign exercise in
collaboration while critics have argued that the money is being squandered on
payments for new leadership roles that could be better spent on reducing class sizes
or provision for children with special needs. A further concern is that the new
‘Communities of Learning’set up by IES represent another form of managerial
control of schools. Clustering of schools may become viewed by governments as a
better way to push neo-liberal reform along than with individual schools (e.g.
federations of academies in England) and it may also encourages the‘superhead’
culture of entrepreneurial and increasingly privatised school leadership. The policy
was supported, after modifications, by the PPTA (secondary teachers union) but
opposed by the NZEI, whose members voted overwhelmingly to reject it.
Yet despite the huge support amongst primary teachers and principals for the
NZEI’s opposition in 2014, over time a number of primary schools are becoming
involved in local IES clusters. By August 2015 there were 42 Communities of
Learning involving 333 schools, with most of these being primary schools. This has
inevitably weakened the NZEI’s position as it has tried to negotiate a more
favourable alternative arrangement with Government, the‘Joint Initiative’. It seems
many school principals and their boards of trustees are looking at their local situ-
ation and thinking that the threat represented by the IES may have been overstated
or can be overlooked.
408 M. Thrupp