Education Minister Hekia Parata is anticipating a drop in New Zealand's education rankings in an international survey next week, but is chalking it up to Asian countries' improvement.
She said a drop in the OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa) is "probable" in a 20-page speech given at the Iwi Chairs Forum in Gisborne yesterday.
She said the high performance of Asian countries was one of the reasons she had sent a delegation to Singapore and Hong Kong last month.
But Labour is attributing the drop to National's focus on test-taking, which the party's education spokesman Chris Hipkins said has "narrowed the focus of our system".