The Education Review Office (ERO) is overhauling the way it reports on the quality of schools in an effort to provide parents with better information about school performance.

The Education Minister said the current system was “dense” and “complicated”.

The ERO sends specialist reviewers to every school in New Zealand to evaluate performance and assess where improvements can be made.

Those evaluations form ERO reports which are often used by parents to help them decide what school to enrol their children into.

The ERO has announced it will change the way the reports are done, with a focus on attendance, progress, achievement and assessment.

These were the areas that “make the biggest difference to learner success and wellbeing”, ERO chief review officer Ruth Shinoda said.

A screenshot of what ERO's new intermediate school reports will look like.

“We wanted to make sure that parents and whānau can easily understand our reports, so they are empowered to ask good questions, make good choices, and get involved in their child’s education.”

The new reports will lift education standards by giving parents “clear, useful and accessible information” about schools in their area.

Education Minister Erica Stanford said parents had told her “key challenges facing our schools or the successes they’re achieving haven’t been evidenced through ERO’s reporting.”

Stanford said previous ERO reports had not been focussed on the details most relevant to parents, and were “dense” and “complicated” to understand.

A screenshot from what ERO's current intermediate school reports look like.

“From Term 2, parents can expect more detail on almost twice as many topics.

“Reports will have clear measurements and strong, visual, easy-to-understand overviews of performance and the value that schools are adding for students.”

Examples of the current and new reports showed the new reports were front-loaded with more detailed tables that were easier to read at a glance.

Education Minister Erica Stanford said parents had told her current ERO reports were "dense" and "complicated" to understand.

The new reports used more colour and clearly defined the metrics that schools will be evaluated with.

For example, “excelling” will mean a school demonstrates consistently strong performance in a certain area, while “working towards” will mean there are gaps in a school’s performance and a varied amount of improvement.

Stanford said ERO hosted parent focus groups around the country to “co-design” the new reports.

The change was one part of the Government’s wider efforts to lift student achievement and “do the basics brilliantly”.

Shinoda said the reports were also “critical” in helping school leaders understand what areas their schools could improve in to lift student outcomes, Shinoda said.

The new reports would have an easily understood picture of how well the school was doing, but would also help schools make changes and get the support they needed in a transparent way.

The overhaul in reporting is intended to celebrate progress and celebrate schools that are doing well.

“Ultimately these changes will drive improvement for education for every learner in New Zealand,” Shinoda said.

“They will enable parents and whānau to engage more effectively in their child’s education and be informed on how well their school is doing. They will also support schools with clear actions for every school, so that school leaders can pay attention to shifting what matters most.”

ERO will start using the new report format for all schools from Term 2 this year.

Other initiatives implemented by this Government included twice yearly reading, writing and maths assessments for Year 3-8 students, Phonics Check, and the Year 2 maths check.

Janhavi Gosavi is a Wellington-based journalist for the New Zealand Herald who covers news in the capital.