“It is the kids time use it well!”

School life gets busy, and often we get ground down in the fine detail and testing and forget the big picture of education.

Our vision is for young people:

• who will be creative, energetic, and enterprising
• who will seize the opportunities offered by new knowledge and technologies to secure a sustainable social, cultural, economic, and environmental future for our country
• who will work to create an Aotearoa New Zealand in which Māori and Pākehā recognise each other as full Treaty partners, and in which all cultures are valued for the contributions they bring
• who, in their school years, will continue to develop the values, knowledge, and competencies that will enable them to live full and satisfying lives
• who will be confident, connected, actively involved, and lifelong learners.

No matter what technology comes along, oral language, reading and writing are still needed in this world and will remain so into the future. It is an indictment that a large number of adults in NZ do not have the basic literacy needs/knowledge and successfully contribute to society efficiently and productively.

I would argue that in some classrooms, even with all the constant testing, some teachers would not trust their gut to make a call on a child’s progress without access to their data.

For me, the Learning Progression Frameworks provides an opportunity to increase teacher pedagogical content knowledge and support them by removing some of the testing from their workload.

If you as a teacher, don’t trust your judgement, then your students will miss out. Relying on student data from the likes of PAT does not show what a student can do because they are a closed answer test.

Consistency comes from using the same illustrations rather than adapting and making your own. The tool creates reliable information that can be used by everyone.

Using PaCT reports

The tool and framework were created to give an on balance decision that looks at the whole child’s literacy ability.  Link to the tool here. 

Looking at the Site

Mustard videos are the information videos - useful with schools in staff meetings.
Other videos are examples of an aspect of practice - from educators in schools using tool.
Screencasts are the how to use. Replaces 124 page user manual.

Good video about the tools creation



Looking at the diagram above, making sense of texts is what reading is about. Students then use the components of making sense of texts to read for different purposes.
When thinking about Learn Create Share very simply, students in the Learn are reading to organise ideas and information for learning (there is also some create in there). Students in the Create are using information and ideas in informational texts (would these be the DLO’s?) Smart Learners are also understanding distractions of online text, and need teaching around how to manage self online to make sense and reading deeper rather than scanning. T shaped literacy from Woolf Fisher supports this.


This learning progression framework is not about pedagogy; it is about content knowledge and how reading, writing and maths develop, what do students need to know before they can do the next thing.

Teachers need to be spending their time creating rich tasks and lessons NOT finding evidence for assessment purposes. 

“Having evidence is not going to make you a better teacher” 

“It is the kids time use it well!