College sees big NCEA progress
Pa¯ pa¯ moa College principal Iva Ropati believes an emphasis on higher standards has resulted in significant NCEA improvement across all levels based on provisional data from last year.
The school’s percentage point improvement from the previous year at each level of the qualification was the best in the region, outperforming every other local secondary school, he said.
“Despite a national decline in NCEA around the country, Pa¯pa¯moa College bucked the trend and presented some impressive new year results.
“There were a number of factors that have culminated in the pleasing improvement.”
He said the school community, staff and students had been fully united in the desire for the school to reinvent itself.
“For too long it was a place that had lost its way and needed to realign itself with some critically important priorities. Far too many students were not achieving — some leaving with little or no qualifications.”
Last year the school started to turn things around and staff were now seeing a very different culture of learning.
“It undertook many school improvement reviews and inquiries and facilitated a huge amount of community workshops to ensure partnerships were in place before any change occurred.”
Ropati said the biggest factor in the school’s revival had been its commitment to its learners.
“The school has somewhat returned to a more traditional model of teaching and learning. While a modern learning physical environment has its place in education, Pa¯pa¯moa College decided to deliver a curriculum more fundamentally within a more single-cell classroom space environment.”
All senior NCEA classes were now accommodated in modular classrooms.
“The school board appreciates the vast improvement and formally acknowledged all staff for their effort to make Pa¯pa¯moa College the school of choice but has also reiterated the need not to rest on what has currently been achieved but to sustain and exceed the results further next year.”
Provisional results indicated that at Pa¯ pa¯ moa College there had been a 15.3 percentage point increase at level 1, a 3 percentage point increase at level 2, a 13.1 percentage point increase at level 3 and a 14.1 percentage point increase at University Entrance.
Ropati took over as principal at the start of term 4 in 2022. It was his first principalship outside Auckland.
He was previously principal at Howick College where he started in 2010 and before that he was principal of One Tree Hill College for seven years. He was deputy principal at Onehunga High School from 2000 until 2002. He moved to the United Kingdom in the early 1990s to play rugby league professionally. It was there he picked up his first teaching job.