The Otago Primary Principals' Association has voted to cease any involvement in the further development of the Ministry of Education's computerised Progress and Consistency Tool (Pact), and boycott this year's trials of the tool.
Earlier this month, the New Zealand Principals' Federation, the New Zealand Educational Institute, the New Zealand Association of Intermediate and Middle Schools, and the Catholic Principals' Association called on school boards, their colleagues and the organisations developing Pact to boycott it.
Last week, during a meeting in Dunedin, Otago Primary Principals' Association (OPPA) members voted to endorse the position of the national education organisations.
The Government plans to make Pact mandatory from 2015, claiming it would make national standards data more reliable.
The system asks teachers to judge pupils' national standards levels by working through illustrations representative of achievement outcomes.
Pact then generates a result for each pupil.
Principals and teachers around the country have said making the tool mandatory would undermine teacher professionalism, reduce quality teaching for pupils, and cement a reliance on data from national standards.
OPPA president Whetu Cormick said the inconsistent manner in which teacher judgements were made across the country brought into question the validity of national standards data.
He believed the standards were flawed by design, and any attempt to mandate Pact would not solve the ''inconsistencies''. He said other regional principals' associations around the country would vote in the coming weeks on whether they would endorse a boycott of the tool.
