Education Minister Chris Hipkins says National Standards have failed to improve literacy and numeracy in New Zealand.

Children of New Zealand's National Standards era have lower literacy, results from an international study show.

Education Minister Chris Hipkins says a range of things will have contributed to the decline but it is clear National Standards "haven't helped" and if national assessment was the answer to poor literacy it has "clearly failed".

New Zealand ranked 33rd out of 50 countries in the 2016 Progress in International Reading and Literacy Study (PIRLS) released on Tuesday, behind frontrunners Russia and Singapore and eight places lower than in 2011.

Girls are still doing better than boys at school but it was Pākehā children's decline in literacy that brought down the country's score in an international test.

The 2016 study, which assessed 5646 year 5 children from 188 New Zealand schools, deemed more than a quarter had low, or less than low, literacy.

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Hipkins said National Standards meant essential skills like literacy and numeracy had become "too narrowly focused" around particular standards, which meant the "overall level of skills had gone down rather than up".

National's education spokeswoman Nikki Kaye said "we need to do better as a country", but did not agree National Standards should go.

Labour campaigned on scrapping the national assessment system and Hipkins will do away with them – although schools that want to keep using the tool as part of reporting a child's progress will be able to do so.

Kaye said there could have been changes to National Standards around progression.

"While we support changes to ensure we have progression around every child, if you don't know where these kids are, how can you help them more? Now that doesn't mean we don't need changes to national standards," she said.

Kaye said the data also showed a "lack of confidence in reading" and wanted the Government to explore that further.

The report showed boys continued to score worse than girls, a trend observed internationally, but the drop in Pākehā children's scores was the "biggest driver" of New Zealand's decline.

Hipkins put that down to there being too much focus on one group, which meant "you often end up making things worse for a different group".

He wanted an "across the board focus", viewing all students as "priority learners".

A "reasonable number" (41 per cent) of Kiwi children reached the 'high' literacy benchmark – an ability to engage with complex texts and questions – but fewer achieved each of the PIRLS benchmarks than those assessed in 2011.

Fewer Māori achieved the 'low' benchmark than five years ago, though their average scores remained similar.

Only Pasifika girls' scores improved, and the study concluded the change was not statistically significant.

While the higher-performing 2011 study cohort had experienced only two years of education under the National Standards system, the 2016 group started school after the assessments were introduced in 2008.

New Zealand's performance in PIRLS had flatlined between 2001 and 2010.

New Zealand Educational Institute president Lynda Stuart was "not surprised at all" that students taught in the era of National Standards had lower literacy.

The primary teachers' union spearheaded protests against the standards when they were introduced in 2010.

"We all knew at the time it was being introduced that it was flawed."

National Standards took away rich learning for children and replaced it with a "one size fits all" model.

The assessments created "levels of anxiety" in children, particular when they knew they were considered "below standard", and standards also narrowed the curriculum, Stuart said.

The union was "celebrating that National Standards are going to be gone" under the new Government.

She hoped changes would be made as soon as possible so schools would not have to report their 2017 data.

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