As teachers take to the streets in protest of the planned education reforms Labour education spokesperson Chris Hipkins says the National government is attempting to fix something that's not broken.

Chris, who visited Tauranga schools yesterday and spoke to a group of NZ Education Institution representatives and teachers, told Otumoetai Primary School principal Geoff Opie the Government has it completely wrong.

Otumoetai Primary School Board of Trustee chairperson Jackie Webb, Labour education spokesperson Chris Hipkins and Otumoetai Primary School principal Geoff Opie talk education. Photo: Zoe Hunter.

'One of the Government's problems is they start from the presumption that the education system is broken and needs to be fixed rather than starting from the presumption that actually the education system is actually 90 per cent of the way there we should just be focusing on how we can make it even better,” says Chris.

On Saturday Western Bay of Plenty teachers, parents and supporters marched through the city holding placards in opposition to the planned changes that include national standards, charter schools, performance based pay and Novopay.

The aim of Chris' visit was to gage what Tauranga schools want from the country's education system.

He says the Government is adopting the worst of the charter school model currently implemented in the United States.

'We've actually already got the best of the charter schools model from overseas now with school boards and trustees and community engagement.

'The bits that they're wanting to pick up, around unregistered teachers and that sort of thing, they're the worst elements from the ones overseas.”

Chris agrees there are many problems with the national standards model in schools saying they are an unfair comparison on school performance.

'It tries to do too many things in one quite arbitrary measure. On the one hand it's supposed to be the main mechanism for reporting to parents. It's supposed to be the benchmark for schooling performance and how we measure individual teachers increasingly.

'It's also supposed to be the progression tool for teaching. And all of those four things actually require quite different approaches but national standards tries to lump them all into one.”

He says there is a better way to report children's achievement standards to parents.

Geoff, who has been teaching for 40 years, says current Government education policies are heading in a more extreme right wing direction.

'It's pushing reforms that have been proven not to work. It seems that the direction we're going in now is disadvantaging the state system, which is not perfect but it's good all the same.”

'If we look at the international statistics around where the (United) States and where England performs in comparison to New Zealand they are many places below us and the policies we are following now will probably drag us down there as well.

'We've got an excellent education system and it's really under attack just now.”