School profiles should be a precursor to rankings

A new website profiling the nation's secondary schools should be developed into a school ranking, according to Education Forum policy advisor Norman LaRocque.

The website, launched this month by the New Zealand Qualifications Authority, contains profiles of each of the country's secondary schools, as well as national figures on the NCEA.

The website does not rank schools in "league table" form, but compares each school against national averages and other schools in that school's decile range.

Mr LaRocque said a league-type table was badly needed to help parents make informed decisions about which schools were best for their children and also to make schools publicly accountable for the results their students achieved.

"This new table helps make schools' achievements more transparent and public but it needs to go further to have any real use. It needs to show which schools are doing well compared to their peers and which are not," he said.

Mr LaRocque said Canada had a ranking system - the Report Card organised by the Fraser Institute - for many of its secondary and primary schools and it had been overwhelmingly popular with families.

"As an author of the Report Card has said: without tools such as ranking systems, parents find it difficult to know the difference between schools.

"In the Fraser Institute's words, 'When government officials say all our schools are excellent, parents get very suspicious but if they have no way of checking, what can they do? There is substantial value in a public system in having information and being able to choose.'"

That message was as applicable to New Zealand as it was to Canada, Mr LaRocque said.

In the recent published Education Forum book Education Matters, author Mark Harrison argues that without rankings New Zealand parents, school boards and teachers have no way of knowing how well their children are achieving in comparison with children in other schools, and against national standards, especially at primary and lower secondary levels.

"By the time [senior secondary school] exams come around, it is too late to pinpoint where improvements are needed - and many of the poorer students have already left or do not participate," he said.

"Parents and managers find it difficult to determine whether the decisions they make about the education of children are correct and to judge whether school programmes are effective.

The lack of information reduces accountability and limits the ability of schools to improve their education services.

"It also reduces incentives for schools and students to maintain academic standards," Dr Harrison said.

Meanwhile, Education Forum chairman and Auckland Grammar School headmaster John Morris told the New Zealand Herald this month that his school's profile this year was “essentially meaningless”.

The school profiles reflect NCEA achievement as a percentage of the total number of pupils at senior level and under this system, less than 10 per cent of students at Auckland Grammar achieved NCEA level one or two, as around half the school sat Cambridge examinations.

Adjusting the figures to account for that would give a much 'healthier' result, Mr Morris said.

Resources

The NZQA secondary schools statistics website.

The Subtext story on the Canadian ranking system is at this web page.

The New Zealand Herald story is at this web page.