Inside Cambridge High's 'recovery room'

By AINSLEY THOMSON

A classroom with the title "achievement recovery room" is at the centre of controversy surrounding Cambridge High School.

On Thursday the New Zealand Qualifications Authority issued the Waikato school with a compliance notice - the first given to a school - saying it must immediately stop assessing students in the room.

But what is it, and why has it caused so much fuss?

The room is in the old library, which the school, in yet another controversial move, decided to get rid of last year.

Students would be sent to the room from their normal classes. Once there, they were supervised by adults who were not trained teachers. There was no learning programme.

Kate Colbert, NZQA secondary education group manager, said:

"Sometimes the teachers knew the students were going, sometimes they didn't."

Students could choose from a selection of tests.

"It might have nothing to do with the subject they were taken out of," Ms Colbert said.

The tests were related to a variety of unit standards and most were at level one. The tests would then be marked.

"But there was no checking that the marking was of a national standard and we require that. There wasn't good record-keeping so we have not been able to track what individual students were doing."

Students would then return to their usual class, but Ms Colbert said teachers would not know what they had been doing and the students would have missed normal work.

The authority said it did not know many students went through the "recovery room" process.