If You Want to Measure the Basics, Use SMART

by Rebecca Thomas

SMART tool — where am I at?

Apparently 1,057 schools have signed up. Roughly half the country. I imagine most of those will be School A (see previous post) — the ones who will make it work because they always do. The ones who will align, adapt, and absorb whatever lands on their desks without needing to ask too many questions.

But not all sign-ups tell the same story.

And little did Erica Stanford know, some of us didn’t sign up because we believed in it. We signed up because sometimes the only way to understand something is to step inside it and watch it unfold in real time, rather than stand on the outside and speculate.

It’s no secret I’ve had a fairly distinct sour taste about the SMART tool since its announcement. That gut feeling hasn’t exactly been soothed by the quiet stream of conversations throughout 2025 — the kind that start with “you didn’t hear this from me but…” and end with more questions than answers.

So the choice for me felt simple. Ignore it. Or walk straight into it and bring something honest back out.

The first step was getting staff familiar with the tool in preparation for PLD.

And we did that properly. No eye rolling or whispered resistance, nobody in the room knew how I feel about the tool. Just professional delivery, led by me, because I am grown up enough to hold my own opinions without letting them contaminate the process. 

But what I was really waiting for wasn’t the teachers compliance. It was actually their curiosity. That 'aha' moment where teachers stop looking at the tool and start seeing their learners inside it.

It didn’t take long.

The moment you place any tool in front of educators that claims to measure their impact, something changes professionally, almost invisibly. You begin to turn the question. Not what do my learners need from me to grow into capable, connected, resilient humans in an ever-changing world, but what do they need to know to succeed on this, this test.

It starts off as a responsible thought, natural. Because no one is going to sit back and let their ākonga walk into something like this and fail.

And that is how it begins.

This is how our teaching changes. Not with a mandate — it doesn't need one. Instead the change begins with an innocent instinct to help our learners.

We don’t name the obvious straight away, but this is the starting point of teaching to the test. This is how knowledge-rich rhetoric and neatly packaged curriculum statements get quietly washed through our classrooms — not through force, but through a tool that measures a teacher’s success by how well that knowledge is transmitted, and by the deep care teachers carry in wanting their learners to succeed.

Because we do care.

And that care is exactly what the system leans on.

It doesn’t demand compliance. It creates conditions where compliance feels responsible.

Led by principals and leaders who are also carrying that same weight — who know that somewhere down the line, those results will sit inside a colour-coded Education Review Office report, where too many red squares don’t just tell a story about data, they tell a story about a school.

And no one wants to be that story.

The same system response we saw in the children — teachers will begin, just as instinctively, to shape their teaching to reach the score. Not because they’ve lost their values, but because the system has made the score visible, measurable, and public.

So their work shifts, not intentionally, but steadily over time.

From teaching what we know our children need — identity, curiosity, connection, the messy, human parts of learning — to teaching what will get them through the task.

And this is not new.

The global education system has poured trillions into assessment tools, platforms, and data systems built on the promise that if we can measure learning more precisely, we will improve it. But what we have actually become very good at is shaping teaching around the measurement itself. Because when something is measured, it matters. And when it matters, it begins to drive behaviour.

Back in the room, the noticing had already begun.

No dramatic statements. Just that quiet, professional shift teachers make when they begin thinking about the children in front of them rather than the system in front of them.

Where are the gaps? How are our kids going to be disadvantaged by this? Not if. How.

The first thing that surfaced was almost laughable, basic.

Calculators.

Not one in sight in the whole school. Not in classrooms or buried in drawers, not even collecting dust in that outdated resource cupboard that somehow still holds onto everything except the thing you actually need.

We do have iPads, of course, but that’s not the same thing. What struck me was the assumption sitting quietly underneath the task — that children would not only have access to a calculator, but a familiarity with it as a tool in its own right.

So there I was, genuinely considering reintroducing the concept of a calculator to a group of children for whom it may as well be a relic. A strange, buttoned device from another time. It felt a bit like offering them a gramophone and expecting fluency.

Then came a comment from experience.

A kaiako who had recently been teaching in Australia, someone familiar with NAPLAN, shared something. When it comes to writing tasks, she said, when students are given a word count to reach, they learn very quickly how to play the system.

I listened and took it at face value.

Until I actually saw it unfold in real time.

I gave the Year 6 kids a chance to be familiar with SMART too. The calculator needed some explaining as suspected and then the writing question popped up.

The question itself was simple enough. In 100 words, explain why you like the place you described.

Sitting underneath the question was the word counter.

0 / 100.

And that — more than the prompt, more than the intent of the task — became the task the children focused on.

The students didn’t misread it.

They read it exactly as it was presented to them.

A number to reach. A target to hit. A visible measure of success that required no interpretation, no deep thinking, no vulnerability in putting ideas into words.

So they responded accordingly.

Keys pressed rapidly. Letters stacked without meaning. Words — or something resembling them — filling the space until the number climbed high enough to satisfy the requirement.

It wasn’t just one student pushing boundaries.

It wasn’t a small group testing the edges.

It was the whole class, independently arriving at the same conclusion about what success looked like in that moment.

What this revealed wasn’t a flaw in the children. It was a clarity about the system.

If a task tells you, clearly and visibly, that success is reaching 100 words, then that is exactly what will be produced. Not depth. Not voice. Not carefully constructed ideas shaped through thought and revision, but volume. Completion. The appearance of meeting the criteria.

And in that sense, yes — it is basic.

But not in the way we might hope.

Not basic as in foundational, or essential, or grounded in the complex, human work of learning. Basic as in what can be counted. What can be standardised. What can be scaled across 1,057 schools and beyond.

Because when you strip everything else away, SMART isn’t just measuring writing and maths. It is measuring how quickly a learner can interpret a system, how efficiently they can respond to what is being asked, and how well they can navigate a digital environment that rewards visible completion over invisible thinking.

And maybe that’s the most unsettling part for me as I reflect on where I am up to now with SMART. Naturally I knew that the system can be gamed when teachers work out how to teach to the test. But what stood out the most is that the children didn’t game it at all. They understood it. They saw it for what it was.

And just like they spammed the keyboard to reach the word count needed, we will begin — just as instinctively — to shape our teaching to reach the score.

More focus on getting it right.

Less risk. Less depth. Less feeling.

Not because teachers don’t care. But because they care too much to let their kids fail a system that has already decided what success looks like.

So if what we are after is a nationally consistent picture — something clean, comparable, and easy to report upwards — then yes, SMART will give you that. But let’s not pretend it is measuring the richness of learning, or the depth of thought, or the stories our ākonga are still learning how to tell.

If you want to measure the basics, then yes.

Use SMART.

But if you want learning to carry breath, identity, and meaning—

never be persuaded to teach to the test.