Reviewers now welcome after early hostility

Stanley Bay School in North Shore City rolled with the punches of a scathing Education Review Office report. MARY JANE BOLAND finds that after early consternation at public criticism, schools are now giving the accountability process good grades.

Nestled among the villas in a leafy maritime suburb of North Shore City lies a school that has experienced a tumultuous few years.

The 90-year-old classrooms at Stanley Bay School, Devonport, have been revamped to fit the needs of the '90s but the real changes have gone on inside.

The 260-pupil primary school received a damning Education Review Office (ERO) report in 1993 which belied the tranquillity of its upper-middle-class surroundings.

Review officers criticised teachers for not spending enough time on certain subjects and highlighted inconsistencies in teachers' planning. They were also concerned that there were no formal procedures to allow the principal to report to the board of trustees on students' achievements or on how well the curriculum was being implemented.

Such a poor report was a shock to teachers and local parents. Some worried mums and dads even enrolled their children elsewhere.

Another report, in 1996, noted that several new teachers were settling into the school. But the review office was still worried that the lack of personnel management systems and an effective curriculum was affecting the quality of education offered.

Two years later, the school is markedly different. Its roll has risen slightly and is expected to peak at 290 by the end of 1999.

A new principal, Heather Richards, took charge last year and Jonathan Moss was appointed the new board chairman in the school trustees elections in April.

Apart from the change of faces, there has been a major change in the way the school is managed.

Mr Moss, a detective, says the difficulty for boards which get a critical report is that trustees often have no idea how to make improvements.

"We're a whole lot of well-meaning lay people effectively governing a school and having to come up to speed very quickly."

Mr Moss says the school management constantly checks to ensure it is meeting the criteria of the 1996 ERO report.

Mrs Richards has regular meetings with the staff to check on how subjects are taught and to toss ideas around. They have also set goals for student achievement.

On the personnel side, all staff now have job descriptions and set individual goals for each year.

"Part of managing the curriculum is through performance managements because we're looking at teachers' planning and classroom observations," Mrs Richards says.

The school's latest report, from last November, said the board had made good progress. The report also said students were provided with a good range of educational opportunities in a supportive learning environment.

Both Mrs Richards and Mr Moss say ongoing communication between the board and the principal was crucial in turning the school's performance around.

Stanley Bay is typical of most schools that manage to resolve their problems after receiving a scathing ERO report.

However, not all schools can tell the same story. The Ministry of Education has appointed 46 commissioners to replace boards since 1989.

They are usually appointed when the quality of education offered is so poor that the review system has not been able to change the school.
Each year around 12 per cent of schools are revisited, within 18 months of an earlier review, because they are not up to scratch. Last year, 170 schools were revisited out of 1073 schools that were reviewed. In 1996, 134 out of 924 schools were revisited.

The president of the School Trustees Association, Janet Kelly, says schools' attitudes towards the ERO have changed since it was created in 1989.

"There was a lot of criticism in the early years, particularly regarding the reporting back to schools when an audit had taken place. It caused a lot of consternation among boards and parents and staff."

Mrs Kelly says most schools do not feel as threatened by the three-yearly audit process as they used to because they realise that self-management means they must be accountable.

"The whole issue with ERO is that they need to be a `critical friend'."

She also thinks that the reviewers are now fairer and better at acknowledging successes.

"When a report was put together in the early years it acknowledged areas that needed addressing but we felt it should recognise when a school was doing well."

Her main concern is that the office still makes criticisms without giving solutions.

However, the head of the ERO, Dr Judith Aitken, says it would be too much of a conflict if her staff audited schools and then provided advice.

Dr Aitken says the office was condemned for its critical approach, particularly when schools were more used to inspectors than the ERO's publicly released reports.

"We're really unapologetic about that because we attempt to take the perspective that the primary beneficiary of schooling should be the student.

"If we cannot easily say that the student is benefiting and we realise that the student is coming to risk then we make no apologies for being highly critical of the service a school provides."

After six years in the job, Dr Aitken says, the biggest change she has noticed is boards and principals now spending a lot more time on quality and performance issues.

As for the ERO, she says, it knows a lot more about assessment than 10 years ago. On a simple level she says it knows which schools are acting lawfully -- by complying with management and educational requirements -- and how good those schools are.

Whether a school does end up getting it right depends on the mixture of the school population, the boards and, possibly most important, the teachers' expectations.

She recalls being horrified at a sign above a school staffroom door in Northland five years ago which read: "Lower your expectations and avoid disappointment."

Those expectations can affect all facets of school life and affect the way a child views school.

Dr Aitken says the office's task for the next 10 years will be to improve how it uses the information collated in schools around the country. It will be especially important to provide more details to parents.

She says the office may do more work in the early-childhood sector but does not see its role expanding into monitoring tertiary institutions.

And she, like Janet Kelly, believes the office does improve the quality of schools.

Mrs Kelly says schools are accountable to the Government, the community and the students.

"We're accountable for the delivery of education; we need to be audited to do that.

"Having an ERO visit can be very stressful for schools. But it should be part of the normal self-managing of the schools rather than having schools say, `Gosh, we've got ERO coming'."