National Standards Shock #1: Big classes work.
National Standards Shock #2: Nobody in the media seems to know anything about simple statistics, and christ, it's doing my head in.
Bigger classes often get good results, therefore bigger classes are somehow desirable? Please, who is in charge of these morons? There is no cause-and-effect relationship here, so for heaven's sake, drop it. Hekia Parata feels vindicated? Well, Hekia, perhaps you need to go back to school for a little bit of maths. Obviously your "big class" at school didn't do as good a job as you thought it did.
The kicker was the reporter stating that kids in bigger schools get better grades.
These "grades" are unmoderated data from unstandardised testing with no consistency in the assessment practices or training and are self-reported by schools and good lord could you get any less scientific about the whole process?
I went to Avondale College, which was a big school - in fact, I think it was the biggest in New Zealand at the time - and the size of the school was a huge detriment to my education. It was so impersonal. I slipped through the cracks so fast and so hard. The teaching was compromised: there were few teachers who had the time or the chance to have decent relationships with their students, and very little likelihood of having anyone important understand your learning needs when there were so many people swarming over the place. My maths teacher, when I told her I just didn't get it, made it clear that I was to sit at the back and not be a nuisance to her, as I was just one of a huge number of people she had to teach.
There is no way that would happen at a primary school, as the ratio is generally lower (I have taught my classes with 21, 24, 26 and 29 students), but the bigger the class, the less time you have to spend one-on-one with students giving feedback and feedforward, and rather than class size, homework, or anything else, the evidence shows that that is the most important thing.
See that word I used? Evidence. I love it because evidence must be solid and research-based before you can draw any conclusions.
The achievement data that has just been released is seriously flawed, but the New Zealand Herald and Dominion Post reporters are so busy drumming up a crisis in education that they don't seem to care.