Catching up to King's

King's High School is world-famous in Dunedin for having the best cricket pitch in town - even better than Carisbrook they say. Its second claim to fame is a move in the mid-90s to do away with Sixth Form Certificate (SFC) and replace it with unit standards.

Although the principal and senior staff at the time say they didn't see moving to unit standards as a radical move for the school, looking back it has taken a long time for the rest of the country to catch up with them.

�	�

What he saw there inspired him to return to King's High School and make vocational training and unit standards a major part of the school curriculum.

Upon his return Ian Simpson persuaded the Ministry of Education to build a catering suite for Kings High School.

"Getting an entire catering suite was a bit of a battle, but we got there in the end."

However the catering suite was far from the end of the story.

By 1995 King's was accredited to offer non-traditional courses and had programmes offering unit standards in tourism and catering, fine arts and sports training.

"For us the unit standards came after we had decided we needed the courses. That is, we looked for ways to assess the programmes we wanted to set up.

"It started to make sense to us to introduce unit standards wherever possible in the sixth form," Ian Simpson said.

Blair Kennedy, HOD Art, says the introduction of unit standards was not seen as a radical move: "It seemed like the perfectly natural thing to do. We probably thought the rest of the country would do it as well. We went to the unit standards training in the mid-90s and just got on with it."

As an examiner and moderator for NZQA, Blair Kennedy has had a lot of contact with other schools and knows of many that had problems picking up on standards based assessment. The King's staff, he says, had a much more gradual and consistent experience.

Originally, each subject could opt in, but after a year or so it was decided that all subjects should use unit standards. Only chemistry and science teachers tried to resist, but after two years they introduced level 3 unit standards into Form 7 programmes.

It was around this time that Ian Simpson and his senior staff began questioning the benefit of having SFC at all. Simpson felt that boys as a rule were penalised because SFC was based on School Certificate results, which were always lower for boys than for girls.

Bryan Frost, a senior staff member at the time and now deputy principal says SFC was not meeting the needs of the top academic students.

"One year the boy who turned out to be the dux in Form 7 and was very successful at university managed only grade 3 in his SFC subjects.

"Unit standards provided the opportunity we wanted to immediately reward students. This immediately redressed the problem of boys getting only SFC grades 5 or 6 when they had obviously been successful," Frost says.

�	�

Ian Simpson said it was clear that education was going to move in the direction of unit standards and what we now know as NCEA, but it still seemed like a big step to remove a major qualification like SFC at the time.

"We were very sure that we didn't want to do anything to penalise our boys. But those of them who were heading for vocations were earning unit standards, which were well recognised by workplaces in the outside world.

King's knew they had to take their parent community with them. There were many meetings of 6th form parents and material sent home. Bryan Frost (the 6th form Dean at the time) says the key was to have teachers who understood unit standards and were positive about the change.

�	�

"Ian Simpson had changed the whole philosophy and administration of the school. The school built itself on change. Like trying the Tikipunga model.

"Another important difference between King's and other schools around the country, was that King's never used unit standards for just the so-called second tier subjects. We had total positivity from the start.

"The simple school philosophy is to get the boys to do better every year. We saw how unit standards could help us to do that."

King's staff on unit standards:

Colin Donald. Principal	�
�	�

Blair Kennedy (HOD Art)
The move sharpened up teaching. We learned how to teach toward standards. It was interesting to talk to colleagues in other schools who still had to deal with all that drivel. We realised how well off we were. We were able to cut down on the number of assessments. In English, they went from 24 assessments a year to about ten.

Bryan Frost (deputy principal)
The situation in English had been especially bad. We internally assessed SC English so in fact our SC grades were set in June of the SC year. By November of the following year, 17 months later, the boys were so much more mature. Even within one year, boys can do things in November they couldn't do in March. Unit standards enabled us to recognise that.

Unit standards enabled us to look at new courses. In PE, for example, they led to a proliferation of courses, mixing and matching unit standards. This will continue with achievement standards.

The simple school philosophy is to get the boys to do better every year. We saw how unit standards could help us to do that.

People predicted Bursaries results would go down. They actually went up. I'm not sure whether that was the influence of unit standards on the boys or the teachers.