KEY POINTS:
Where: Glen Taylor School, Glen Innes.
What: Intensive programme of twice-yearly testing of Year 4-8 students.
Why: To turn around the track record of high staff turnover and the performance of students.
Result: Achievement data shows students are learning at twice the expected rate.
Glen Taylor School's meet-the-teacher nights have a new twist this year.
For the first time, parents visiting the classroom will find their child - not their child's teacher - host for the night.
The pupils will guide parents through a portfolio of school work and, using results from a twice-yearly series of four tests, talk about subject areas in which they excel and those that need more work.
The scene is a far cry from the situation a few years ago, when the Glen Innes primary was maligned in official reports.
A local resident said the school had gone from a "diabolical embarrassment" to an institution of favour.
Now, data from Assessment Tools for Teaching and Learning tests, known as as TTle, showed students learned at twice the expected rate.
The decile-one school was held up as a success for its use of assessment in a speech by National Party leader John Key this year. Principal Lin Avery, who started as the third principal in 18 months in 2004, called on skills developed during five years working as an assessment specialist in the private sector.
She took a firm line on the testing of senior students. "I believe that if you get learning right, the behaviour takes care of itself."
Mrs Avery said she employed TTle as soon as possible.
The tests were increasingly used in schools but even now some seemed to be "phasing them in", she said, five years after they were introduced.
At Glen Taylor, students in Year 4-8 take part in an "assessment week" twice a year. During the week, they sit a 40-minute test in a different subject on four mornings.
Mrs Avery said Glen Taylor pupils got their results back - again a step some others do not take.
"It's an opportunity for them to recognise their progress and celebrate what they know," she said, "and for them to identify with the teacher what their next learning steps are."
It taps into the education buzz word of "personalising" learning. New Zealand Schools Trustees Association president Lorraine Kerr said she had received excellent feedback from schools using the twice-yearly testing.
"It keeps the teachers focused on where the children are at and how they can improve the students. It allows the teacher to deliver a programme that will improve the students from where they know they are at in the first test to where they want them to be in the second."
Ms Kerr said it wasn't too intense for the students to undergo the testing.
"The intensity is probably around the work the teachers have to do."
Professor John Hattie, TTle project director and a member of the University of Auckland faculty of education, said Glen Taylor School's approach to the assessment system had "set the standard".
"They are using it, as they should do, to find out where their problems are, to have a kind of external reference to what they are doing and not just appeal to gut instinct."
The school's use of the system was excellent but not unique, he said, as about 30 or 40 per cent of schools nationally used it on a regular basis.
"Glen Taylor is quite a success story," Professor Hattie said.
However, the state of the school in the late 1990s told a different tale.
According to a 1999 Education Review Office report, Glen Taylor had a raft of problems.
The school had difficulty recruiting and keeping experienced staff, which in turn disrupted teachers' professional development and student achievement.
In 2002, the ERO found a similar situation and increased its visits to the school from the regular timetable of once every three years.
In 2003, the ERO's supplementary report again found high staff turnover and said teachers were not consistently helping students struggling with literacy and numeracy.
However, in 2004 it sensed a turnaround. The officials visited again and reported a "positive direction" at the school that signalled "the end of a difficult period" in its history.
Mrs Avery is confident the review office team will have liked what they found on their most recent visit.
She said she was not put off by the "malaise" that had settled on the school before she arrived.
The mother-of-two, who trained as a teacher in the early 1980s, was drawn back into the classroom by her love of children after going to a conference that highlighted the growing Pacific Island population.
Mrs Avery said she knew children in Pacific Island and Maori families were over-represented in under-achievement.
"They deserve to have the best school leaders and the best teachers," she said.
"The kids that we've got now will be the adults who are running the country.
"To me that created a real urgency in making sure that children are achieving well."
The school of hard knocks
The belief that teachers can make a difference kept Rita Ranasinghe at Glen Taylor School when most others left.
Mrs Ranasinghe, now junior school assistant principal, is one of just two teachers remaining from the time before Lin Avery arrived as principal three years ago.
It was tough at the school before then and Mrs Ranasinghe admits she did think about moving on. But she's pleased she hung in there to try to make a difference.
"Every year, you get a bad ERO report, so you want to work in a school that has success," she says. "Now it's a very good place to work."
Previously, pupils were not achieving as well and became disruptive.
She can't point to any one incident in a classroom, but says teachers had a general feeling of being shellshocked.
The change came after Mrs Avery came on board as the third principal in 18 months, she says. They discussed how to get pupils back on track and laid down a development plan for staff as well.
Now Mrs Ranasinghe delights in her work so much that she plans to stay at the school for more years to enjoy the benefit.
The most rewarding aspect was the improvement in pupils' reading.
A dozen children are below their age in reading - much fewer than before - and she knows them all by name.
"We know them, teachers know them, we help them," says Mrs Ranasinghe. "When you teach kids and you know that they are learning, that's a good feeling."
