Editorial

The summer holidays allow for a time of reflection on the year that was, and the year that is to be. School is a busy place, made up of so many different aspects, each of them capable of having a transformative impact on our young people. When thinking about individual students, it is a difficult task to take one aspect in isolation in order to determine its impact on that student.

The same can be said of trying to define or rank a school by their NCEA results. The media love to use these statistics and put them into league tables in order to ‘prove’ the relative merits of one local secondary school verses another.

Reducing the entire performance of any school to a simple number is, in my opinion, fraught with uncertainty. Certainly, a number can be used when we want to see if one person or team is performing better than another, for example in golf, sailing, cricket, netball etc. However, if we were to use similar criteria for judging a profession, that measure of comparison would be, at the very least, inadequate. I would argue that passengers on a plane would gain very little comfort if an airline pilot was to announce, “Ladies and gentlemen I am proud to announce that my score on the aviation exam was better than my competitors, however I am still a little unsure as to how I land this plane.”

In such matters, it is best not to compare pilots with pilots, but, instead, their ability to achieve required aviation standards, i.e. an equal number of take-offs to landings. On matters that are deadly serious we should base our comparisons not on a simple score, but on standards. In matters of less importance, e.g. sport, comparative measurements are more appropriate.

The validity of representing schools based on raw scores devoid of some kind of school context is, for me, the crux of the matter. Presenting a school as a figure on a league table does not take into account prior attainment, student progress, or social composition. While social commentators would love to see these numbers, the Tomorrows’ School competitive model under which we currently operate could conceivably lead to schools narrowing their teaching focus, competing for the “best” students, and rejecting those who fall behind.

A reliance on league tables for the public to determine the health of any school would have the effect of removing the heart of an educational institution. Whilst I believe that improving the academic performance of students is the key role in any school, this is not all that we do. Schools are driven by a moral purpose to produce citizens who contribute positively to their communities. How could a league table represent the 400 Otumoetai College students who took part in the Community Service Day last year? This event alone speaks to the folly of a mark on a league table. We must always keep in mind that schools, and especially the individuals within them, are so much more than a number.