Judith:The purpose of our visit to Thailand is to continue a relationship, which began last year with the people in ONEC. Because we were very interested that here in Thailand you were setting up such a large reform program. And in particular that you were looking at in setting up and emphasized our own New Zealand Education Review Office. So our purpose of coming is to assist and support your people in setting up your own office for evaluation standards assurance.

Judith: The main function of the Education Review Office is to provide public reports on the quality of education in all of the schools and all of the early childhood centers and kindergartens of New Zealand both public schools and private schools.

Judith: We look for people who have skills and gathering evidence and forming a critical opinion and a judgement about the quality of education. They need to not necessarily be people who have been teachers themselves or school principals but they do need to have very good intellectual ability at looking at facts and waving up what they see and forming a helpful judgement.

Karen: And they need the skills, that I believe, to make the information clear to arrange about the people. They have to be good communicators as well as having all those skills and competency. Because they have to tell the school principles, parents, government agencies and the public about what they find in the way that is very easy to understand.

Judith: Once every three or four years, a school will have a review by the Education Review Office. That means we ask them to send us information about how they are conducting the education for children. We visit the schools to verify that what they have said is actually happening. We are going to the classroom and talk to the teachers and talk to the children and then we prepare a report. That report goes back to the schools. It goes to the government agency and it is also released to the public, newspapers for examples. It is released to the public at the same time as it goes to the school board and the principals and the government agencies. It is a public document.

Karen: The main problem to begin with is the quality of the information that the schools are able to give us about how they are delivering the education to students, how the students are learning and how they know that the students are learning. So I think that probably this issue is the most difficult for us to deal with. And then to find ways of using the information that the school has. So the school find answers to the thing that it is not to do it or not doing it as well as it could.

Judith: The quality of information is the problem itself. Schools may sometimes try to deceive you and may sometimes try to say this is what we do. But the person goes to this school can really quite quickly tell whether they have just been doing it this week or whether they have been doing it for a year or so.

Judith: Yes, we do without a doubt. We know for examples that the way in which schools carry out their own administration and management has been able to demonstrate that they have really improved at very great deal over the last eight years. We know that school principles and teachers are now much more aware of their own educational responsibilities. We also know that they are much more conscious of the responsibility they have to the parents and the wider community. They are really able now to be held to account for the teaching that they provide for the children. Because everything is in public, it is all in the public area and people in different part of the country can look at the report and think "my children are not getting an education that is as good as that" or "my children are getting an education that is better than that". And so, it has been very important in helping to improve the quality of education.

Karen: As well as improving the quality of education on the national scale like that, we are also been able to evaluating schools and going back where they were failing to make the community the board of those schools focus on the issues, focus on what was wrong and generate to improve things. At the moment, we go back and do a follow-up review in about 25% of our schools and of those about 70-80% made sufficient improvement in six months for them to come back into the regular process of reviewing and that is quite significant. Before the Education Review Office started reviewing in this way, people had no way of knowing that some New Zealand children were being properly taught.

Judith: First of all, we are very impressed that the Education Review Office or what you call the Office of National Education Standards and Quality Assessment is being set up in Thailand. We are able to say, this is the right way to go. You are really setting off in the right way to go. We think that there are some work which will be able to be done over the next year and developing a good set of procedures for how reviewers should go about their work. For getting a good set of ideas about the people you want to recruit and for having good arrangement for assisting those people. We feel very confident in deed that this is an excellent development and we are full of inspiration for the way it has been carried out in Thailand.

Karen: I think that what you have got the opportunity to set up here is really exciting and the impact that could have on the education, I think it is tremendous.