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ERO is the Education Review Office. It is the government agency that reviews schools and publishes reports about them. And ERO has changed those public reports. That matters, because when you change the way schools are publicly described, you change the way parents, communities, media and government are taught to see them. Under the new model, schools are now being presented through a much more front-loaded, simplified format: a Snapshot, an Overview, and a Full Report, with schools sorted into categories like Excelling, Doing well, Working towards, or Improvement required. And the examples ERO chose to launch this with are honestly ridiculous. The first example is a primary school with an EQI of 497. EQI stands for Equity Index. It is supposed to measure how many socio-economic barriers students at a school are facing. Higher EQI means more barriers. ERO is explicit that EQI is not supposed to be a measure of school quality. But then look at what they do with that example. That school is the one hit with repeated “Improvement required” labels. It is the one called a “school of concern”. It is the one ERO says it does not have confidence in without external intervention. It is the one put on an 18-month cycle and framed as needing specialist help. Then compare that with the secondary example. That is the polished model. Lower EQI. More advantaged-looking context. Very experienced male principal. That is the example ERO says it has confidence in. So right out of the gate, the public is being taught a very clear lesson: higher-barrier school = concern lower-barrier school = confidence And if the defence of that is basically, “well of course the first school looks worse, it has a high EQI,” then you have already proved the problem. EQI is supposed to measure barriers and support needs, not quality. So why are we building a public reporting model that seems perfectly designed to turn barriers into stigma? That is why people are comparing this to England. Because this is exactly the kind of Ofsted-style report-card logic people have warned about for years: simplified public labelling, reputational pressure, and a model that can flatten context into something that looks objective and neutral when it really isn’t. And this isn’t just me saying it. A group of Auckland principals have already warned that these reports are unfair on schools in poorer communities and are already being used by parents to sort schools into “good or bad”. That is the danger. A school can be dealing with housing stress, poverty, health issues, attendance barriers, trauma, all sorts of things outside the school gate, and still be doing an incredible job. Another school can start from a much higher baseline, add less value overall, and still look better under a model like this. So what are we actually measuring here? School quality? Or community hardship? A respected principal has now created a formal template to review the ERO reviewers themselves. Not the school. The reviewers. And honestly? Good. Because if ERO is going to walk into schools, publicly judge them, and attach government authority to that judgement, then the review process itself should be open to scrutiny too. Did the reviewers understand the community? Did they understand Te Tiriti? Did they understand trauma? Did they understand the learning journey of the school? Did they use real professional judgement, or did they just turn up with a tick-box mentality? And did the written report actually reflect what they said in person? So here’s the plan. I’m going to link that reviewer-feedback template: You can find this here: https://beacons.ai/brieelliott If ERO comes to your school, use it. Fill it in properly. Be specific. Be factual. Be serious. And when ERO publishes its report, publish your review of the reviewers too. Or send it to me, and I’ll share it. Because accountability should not run one way. Erica Stanford might not care what teachers think. She might not care what principals think. Fine. She can care what happens when schools start publicly documenting the quality of the people sent in to judge them. Because once that starts happening at scale, this stops being a one-way exercise in power. This becomes accountability. <3 My fave thing. And that is exactly what this government never planned on giving us. #NZpolitics #NZeducation Read more: https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/political/591823/auckland-principals-concerned-by-new-ero-school-performance-reports