System worth the hard work, say teachers

Principal Owen Hoskin puts in an extra two hours on NCEA, taking his working week up to 75 hours. Picture / Greg Bowker

At Henderson High School the country's new assessment system has bumped up costs, forced staff into longer hours and created an almost endless administrative paper-trail.

But staff at the West Auckland school maintain the National Certificate of Educational Achievement is headed in the right direction.

"It's not just about [students being] right or wrong," said head of social studies Kevin Harvey. "It's about presenting and considering arguments, and understanding."

By the end of this year, secondary schools will have delivered at least two years of every level of the NCEA.

At Henderson High, a hard-pressed decile 3 school with more than 860 students, the philosophical arguments about the new system are seen as an irritating sideline to the business of delivering education.

Nobody can point to firm figures proving the NCEA is better or worse for students. However, teachers have felt the impact on staff and student workloads since standards-based assessment began.

Deputy principal for curriculum Peter Coddington estimates he spends an hour more a day on managing and overseeing the system.

There is another half day's work each week for an administrator and two hours a week for the principal's NCEA liaison officer.

Principal Owen Hoskin says he spends an extra two hours on NCEA, taking his working week to up to 75 hours. Mr Hoskin, who has been principal at Henderson for eight years, said all the extra time and administration had a financial cost, "which must all be absorbed".

Staff also had to put extra time into helping students with the discipline needed for continuous assessment.

Deputy principal Jacquie Wogan said many students came from backgrounds where that kind of discipline was not the norm. "Some students need part-time jobs to help their families, which can be difficult to work around a continuous assessment system. So more time must go into helping the students and their families understand and cope with this."

Mr Harvey said the successful students were often those who could develop an independent work ethic, which was different from a traditional exam system.

Teachers were "galloping to keep up", said Mr Hoskin.

And while most at Henderson High felt they did not have enough time to implement such a change, they insisted NCEA was the best for New Zealand's children.

"Children are learning the same things as they were 20 years ago, it's just the way we assess what they can do that has changed," said head of science Kamal Chandra.

"I would not want to go backwards, because this generation will leave school with a record in their hand of what they are capable of. It may be academic or it may be skilled labour, but it won't be being branded as a failure from school onwards."

Mr Hoskin said it was difficult to judge whether students were doing better under NCEA but some students, who traditionally believed they would get nothing out of school, now knew they could.

He said the biggest challenge might not be delivering the system to students, but rather persuading critics who either failed or refused to understand NCEA.

Mr Hoskin said the way NCEA was broken down into units and credits at the moment was an "atomising" of the curriculum that confused many people.

But he expected the system would be refined and easier to understand.

"There is a fantastic level of information, but it is not refined enough yet," Hoskin said. "It's like a rugby game where we can describe every nuance and movement, but people are still asking, 'But did he score a try?'

"No assessment system is perfect, but as it settles in [the answer to] that question will become obvious."

Henderson High

* Roll: 860 students
* Decile ranking: 3 (out of 10, 1=poorest, 10=richest)
* Verdict on NCEA: Needs work but worth persevering with