After ERO Has Gone: Who Decides What Counts?

by Rebecca Thomas

As the dust settles and you finally get a chance to reflect on what happened when ERO came to visit, there is a weird feeling that settles over the leadership team.

It takes a while to decompress.

For days you have been ‘on’. Preparing; explaining; answering; finding things and linking them — giving access to digital pixels. Justifying things and thinking about things you hadn't thought about for months because you had been too busy actually doing them.

And then they leave.

And you are left with the strange quiet that comes afterwards. Not tumble weeds or crickets, just an emptiness like you have been rung out, dried out and emotionless.

Blogging and writing have always helped me process things — my therapy. Sharing this journey with you all has probably helped me make sense of it, but I hope it has also helped those who have been through ERO, or those sitting nervously waiting for their turn, understand what it can feel like from this side of the table.

And the more I have thought about what unfolded, the more uncomfortable I have become with one particular word.

Cruel.

Not the people. I don't think the people were cruel, but the process was. There was something cruel about sitting opposite two people and being asked, in various ways, whether I really knew what I thought I knew. Whether the story I was telling about our children could be trusted. If we had enough evidence for someone else. Stories to prove progress. I couldn't help wondering what it all cost (financially - not emotionally now). To be fair they did ask me what ‘my cost’ was working at the school that says ‘yes’. So, what is the cost to the education sector to have visitors for two days?

In dollars, government, tax payer dollars: the travel; the accommodation; the fuel; the carbon footprint from plane tickets; the hours of professional learning; the preparation; the leadership time; the teacher's time; the reports; the meetings; the evidence gathering. I have a good idea — I have worked this circuit and done the maths in a previous life.

And eventually all of that ‘cost’ materialised as two people sitting opposite me, in one of our country's lowest socioeconomic communities, asking whether I knew that what I knew was actually true. And I kept wondering what that same investment might look like if more of it reached the children sitting in the classrooms we were actually talking about.

Because when I reread my words — which I try very hard not to do — there was one line from the whole experience that wouldn't leave me alone. “How could you capture evidence of the progress you do make?” And my answer is still the same. Evidence for who? 

I can show you progress. Come with me. I'll show you the child who used to leave the classroom ten times before morning tea and now sometimes makes it all the way through maths. I'll show you the child who couldn't read the page six months ago but will now attempt the first sentence because someone has given them a microphone on a karaoke machine that finally convinced them that getting it wrong isn't something to be ashamed of. The parent who comes through the gate now and stays longer than perhaps we would like. The child who comes back after yesterday went spectacularly wrong. The child who finally says sorry. The child who accepts the apology. The child who belongs. 

I have evidence everywhere. 

The problem is that most of it doesn't fit neatly into a box — it just can't be 'captured' for someone else. And perhaps that is why another question from our ERO visit has been rattling around inside my head. “If you had to answer to your Board and show goods for the return on their investment, where are they getting bang for buck?” Bang for buck. Seriously? 

What do you say when your results are shit? 

Because ours are, they really are. Red, orange and ugly. What do you say when the numbers on the page cannot possibly explain what is happening inside the gates?

What is the bang for buck when the work isn't simply lifting a reading level (defined by someone else's measure of success), but interrupting trauma?  What is it worth when a child who has learnt not to trust adults begins to trust one? What is it worth when a whānau who were failed by education bring the next generation through the gate anyway? What is it worth when a child who has spent years being told, directly or indirectly, that school isn't a place for kids like them discovers that actually it might be? What is it worth when whakapapa does not have to keep recycling trauma handed from one generation to another through experiences of a colonised education system? Where does that all go on the spreadsheet?

Because if I am really being asked about bang for buck, then perhaps we need to talk about what the bang actually is. If the bang is a movement on a graph by the end of the year, then perhaps we aren't very good value for money. Our numbers are messy; some of our children will still be below expectation in December. Some considerably so.

In the current system we are being asked to capture more evidence of progress, the reviewers even suggested that AI could help me spit out a fancy report. AI could help me document it. Measure it and track it. Make the invisible visible for someone else. But every hour spent proving that the work happened is an hour that cannot be spent doing the work.

Perhaps the problem isn't that schools like ours don't have enough evidence. Perhaps the problem is that we have built systems that recognise some kinds of evidence much more easily than others.  And if the only evidence that counts is the evidence that fits into the box, perhaps it isn't our evidence that needs improving.

Perhaps it's the box.