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Andrew Dickens: Passing at school about taking responsibilty

Author
Andrew Dickens,
Publish Date
Fri, 27 Apr 2018, 11:34AM
Chilton Saint James School in Lower Hutt is abandoning NCEA for Cambridge International Examinations. (Photo: NZ Herald)
Chilton Saint James School in Lower Hutt is abandoning NCEA for Cambridge International Examinations. (Photo: NZ Herald)

Andrew Dickens: Passing at school about taking responsibilty

Author
Andrew Dickens,
Publish Date
Fri, 27 Apr 2018, 11:34AM

So news is through that a Wellington school is abandoning NCEA for Cambridge International Examinations.

It’s the first school in Wellington to do so, it’s Chilton Saint James School in Lower Hutt. Principal Kathy Lloyd-Parker says the school will have phased out NCEA by 2020. She’s been at the school for two years and says she did not like what she saw when it came to NCEA. She thinks it creates lethargic practice with students saying 'achieved is enough, I've got enough credits', and then losing focus."

Other students who were involved in arts, dance and drama were struggling to balance it with their six-weekly internal assessments.
Now there’s a few things here. Firstly the school made the paper a couple of weeks ago with a celebratory article about their ballet academy which has 9 students including a boy. It’s the first ballet academy to be integrated with a school system. The article talked about students dancing the day away and it’s something the principal wanted.

Now she’s disposing of NCEA because these ballet dancers are finding it too hard to meet the academic goals because of the 6 weekly internal assessments. It appears she’d rather go with the Cambridge system which relies on bigger end of year exams. This seems like a strange logic. Surely 6 weekly assessments provide more academic challenges for a student than dancing all year and cramming at the end of it.

But the other comment she made was that students in NCEA are only after credits and only focussed on achieved. Somehow she seems to be blaming the system and not the students. Both my boys did NCEA and both my boys had to strive for merit or greater if they wanted access to study at tertiary level.

Both tailored their subjects to their strengths. One in Science and the other in media. But we as parents also demanded that the boys had to take numeracy and literacy subjects until Year 12 to ensure they had a basic knowledge framework for life. Both had diligent teachers. Both excelled and are flying through university.

Now NCEA is not perfect. But neither is any education system because one size does not fit all. But there’s one thing I learnt from our NCEA experience.
An education system only works if the school, the teachers, the students and the parents all work together to strive for the student to be the best they can be. It’s about the participants, the stakeholders, having personal responsibility and aspiration and without that no system will suddenly work magic.

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