The Education (National Standards) Amendment Act 2008 sets in place the New Zealand government’s ten-step Crusade for Literacy and Numeracy (Hon. John Key, 13 October, 2008). As part of that crusade national standards will be set in literacy and numeracy.

Literacy learning progressions developed by the Ministry of Education describe the literacy learning expected of students at particular points in their schooling from year 0 (school entry) to year 10 (third year of secondary school). The progressions have been derived from “evidence-based principles”, rather than evidence of students’ actual achievement.

The New Zealand Assessment Academy (2009) argues strongly that the national standards be “evidence-based and achievable” (in terms of students’ actual achievement). In addition, the NZAA proposes that the national standards need to be ‘rich’; that is, articulated as broad, multi-faceted descriptive indicators of what students at each year level can achieve/can reasonably be expected to achieve; have multiple levels so that there is incentive for all students and teachers to continue to make measured improvements to their achievement; focus on growth; and provide ‘benchmarks’ against which teachers can readily, validly and reliably interpret their students’ progress.

The National Education Monitoring Project (NEMP) monitors the achievement of nationally representative samples of students in year 4 and year 8 across the curriculum, and therefore, provides an evidence-base of students’ literacy achievement.

This paper reports an investigation into year 4 and year 8 students’ achievement on NEMP literacy tasks for students who fall at the 10th, 30th, 70th and 90th percentiles. In doing so, it provides descriptive indicators of what students can achieve, informs the validity of the national standards; and discusses the extent to which the national standards are in fact evidence-based and reasonable