Over the last decade, there has been increasing discussion at the government, policy and funder level in favour of requiring educational, social and community programmes and interventions to provide evidence of their effectiveness. This evidence is then used to determine whether the programme is deemed worthy of future or continued

How do we make judgments about how well our schooling system is performing? Domestically, the most common methods use NCEA and National Standards results. In addition, the Education Review Office(ERO) reports on school performance. For international benchmarking the current favourite method is the Programme for International Testing (PISA). All of these