Wellington, July 5 NZPA - Principals are writing to the Government offering to work alongside it to create a model that works better than national standards and will improve student achievement.

At the same time more and more principals are boycotting training on the standards.

However, Education Minister Anne Tolley has made it clear she wants to push on with the standards and will welcome any constructive approach to do that, but is not interested in going back to the drawing board.

New Zealand Principals Federation vice-president Peter Simpson told NZPA today that he hoped Ms Tolley would consider its request to work together on coming up with alternatives to the controversial national standards.

On Friday about 550 principals at the Principals Federation conference in Queenstown voted to oppose the standards. They also voted to support regional associations that decided not to participate in training such as Canterbury, Auckland, Northland, Southland, Franklin. However, Mr Simpson pointed out those associations could only offer advice and it was up to individual schools what they did.

The conference also voted to write a submission to Ms Tolley, "outlining where we see the flaws but putting in...our thoughts about how we can deliver the intended outcome of the national standards system which is the raising of student achievement," he said.

"We believe in our professional judgment now that we have spent time working with the national standards. There are fundamental flaws with them and they are not going to deliver the intent of the system."

Mr Simpson said if the submission was rejected the federation would need to go back to members to decide where to go next.

"We are wanting to work with the Minister and the Government and it's not our intention to go out via the media to be critical... we do want to work together to get it right."

At Friday's conference Ms Tolley said teachers had to do what they were told by the Government and should talk to her rather than complain to the media.

Ms Tolley said the federation had had 10 years to come up with a plan to address problems but had yet to do so.

"The Principals' Federation has stated it wants a positive relationship with me and I welcome any constructive ideas it has on the implementation of the National Standards," she said.

"The standards were only introduced in February and we are in a three year implementation phase. The NZPF can also provide feedback into the monitoring and evaluation programme or speak to my independent advisory group.

"If changes need to be made then we'll make them, but this Government is not going to stand by while up to one in five children are being failed by the schooling system."

Mrs Tolley said she had got "great feedback" from parents after getting the new reports.

"Principals and teachers asked for training and we are providing it through a $26 million investment. There have been concerns about the quality of some of the sessions, and this has been taken into account. I've asked the ministry to monitor the training closely, to make sure any concerns continue to be addressed. "Any boycott of training can only harm children, and is merely political posturing."

National standards have already been introduced in schools. They will be used to assess children against benchmarks in reading, writing and maths with regular reports sent to parents.