Day of the long hard look

(The video opens on a woman sitting in an office, looking into the camera. Behind her on a cabinet sits a photo of herself speaking on a stage and propped-up against it are two taiaha. As she says, “every year”, text along the bottom of the screen reads, “Elizabeth Forgie, Principal, Kerikeri High School” and the camera shows children in uniforms with bags walking to class.)

 

We were tracking really steadily, and every year we were either tracking up, or holding.

 

(We now see a classroom where a teacher sits with a student. Elizabeth’s voiceover continues.)

But if a group is not succeeding in your school, you concentrate on them and keep on concentrating on them. So I always really did feel that it was fragile.

 

(A man now stands in front of a wall with a large calendar pined to it as he speaks to the camera. Text on the bottom of the screen reads, “Daniel Wise, Vice Principal, Kerikeri High School”.)

I'm the principal's nominee in the school, so I'm keeping an eye on that date where NZQA are releasing their data.

 

(His voiceover continues as we see him sitting at a desk, working on a computer.)

And as soon as it's out, I start my own analysis on that data.

 

(As he mentions the 2014 results the video returns to him in front of the calendar.)

And unfortunately, with our 2014 results, we did have a bit of a disappointing run, particularly for our Māori students that year, which was a surprise to us, to be honest.

 

(He continues as we return to his computer.)

It wasn't the positive news that I hoped that I would be sharing with everybody at that time.

 

(The camera returns to Elizabeth Forgie in the office.)

We hadn't seen a result like that since 2009, and yet we'd done so much work for so long.

 

(We are back with Daniel Wise in front of the calendar.)

We have made some really good gains over the years, in terms of Māori achievement in our school.

 

(Once again we see Daniel at the computer, then back to the calendar.)

And we take great pride in the work that we've done there. And so to take a drop like we did in 2014, we were feeling not very good about that.

And we thought, we need to do something about this. We need to understand more about why this happened and how this could possibly happen.

 

(Daniel is briefly seen sitting in a chair looking through a report, before panning up to show him in an office with Elizabeth and several other adults. They discuss something as his voiceover continues.)

I mean, one of the things we were most perturbed about was how close some students had got to getting over the line. And we're talking within one or two standards worth of credits. How did we not know, in November, that these kids were this close and not do anything about that?

 

(The scene continues as Elizabeth takes over the voiceover.)

We all got together after the results had come out and Daniel had had a chance to crunch them.

 

(Elizabeth now speaks into the camera.)

And looking back on it, we had what I now call the day of the long, hard look, because we all had a lot of questions.

 

(The video returns to the meeting and Daniel resumes the voiceover.)

There was a lot of soul-searching, and a lot of examination of that data, to really start to think about those individuals.

 

(Once again Daniel stands in front of the calander.)

And so we broke it down to that level of student-by-student.

What's happened for this student? So we had the names.

 

(As he speaks we return to the meeting, then back to him in front of the calendar.)

We had their educational story-- in terms of NCEA level 1-- in front of us, and really focused on each individual student to see what patterns or what things might have caused that drop in result.

 

(The scene continues as Elizabeth takes over the voiceover.)

The questions you were asking yourself was: is it because they didn't get literacy? Is it because they didn't get numeracy? The answer to that was, no.

 

(Elizabeth is back in her office.)

Is it because they actually just didn't get 80 credits? And the answer to that was, yes.

 

(We return to the meeting.)

And so it was a matter of mining that information student-by-student. It threw up things like, how many students in that year had arrived in our school since June?

(And back to Elizabeth’s office.)

And some of them had even left before they sat the external. So there was some work to do there around what we now call lateral transfers.

 

(We quickly return to meeting as Daniel takes over the voiceover, then back to him in front of the calendar.)

We identify that we have always been very data rich in our school, but information poor.

 

(As he continues to speak, we see Daniel back at his computer, then standing in front of the calendar again.)

We've got all this information stored about these students, but that information hasn't necessarily been easily accessible and in a way that we can use carefully on an individual student basis, as well as a cohort basis, to support those students around their achievement.

 

(The camera now shows Daniel with a man and a woman in an office sitting around a small table. He writes on a paper with a marker. We then return to him in front of the poster once more, then back to the office. His voiceover continues.)

At one of our meetings with Kia Eke Panuku, Steven was able to bring his own personal expertise around data, as well as show us some exemplars and some examples of what other schools were doing with their data, and think about what that might look like in our setting and in our context, as well as with the technology that we have available.

 

(The camera zooms in on Daniel’s hands as he circles numbers on a printout.)

And so we were able to take that expertise as a starting point for the development of our tracking tools across the senior school.

 

(The video zooms out as we continues to write. Elizabeth now speaks in voice over.)

There isn't something you can take off the hook.

 

(We briefly see Elizabeth speaking into the camera before shifting to a different scene in the office. Elizabeth, Daniel sit around her desk as another man sits in the background. They discuss something as they both click through an app on their iphones.)

What you need is something that suits your school culture.

 

(The camera zooms in and we can see an app called “NCEA For Employers”.)

And we knew what we wanted, but we didn't know how to build it.

 

(Zooming back out, we see the third man gesturing as he says something.

Kia Eke Panuku was able to give us just the right expertise, just in time, within a week of the day of the long, hard look.

 

(We briefly see Elizabeth in her office before the video fades to black.)