School ‘enrols’ family not just the child

At parent-teacher evenings at West Auckland’s Flanshaw Rd Primary School, the children report back to their parents on their own progress.

“The students report on their learning,” says principal Dr Cherie Taylor-Patel.

“So the teachers have to share all the information with the students so they can do it. It consolidates their understanding about where they are up to and where to next.”

Taylor-Patel, who wrote her doctoral thesis on the system she calls “student-led conferences” in 2011, says the NZ Initiative idea that teachers can be rated just on their students’ NCEA results is “simplistic”.

“I worry about the complexity of the job, and no one method actually measures adequately covering off what you deem to be a great teacher,” she says.

Flanshaw Rd, a decile 5 school, is as multicultural as any Auckland school: a third Pakeha, a quarter Maori, and about a fifth each Pasifika and Asian.

It boasts 85 per cent of its students achieving national standards, including 80 per cent of its Maori pupils at or above standards in reading and writing and 78 per cent in maths. (NZ averages for writing, for example, are 71 per cent for all students and 62 per cent for Maori.)

It is part of a 157-school Maori Achievement Collaborative which has lifted Maori students at or above standard in writing by 11 per cent, partly by linking the curriculum to local subjects such as the original guardians of the area portrayed on a carved pou at the school.

Taylor-Patel says of the school’s approach: “You don’t enrol the student, you enrol the family.”