Southern Cross Senior Campus
Karen Douglas at Southern Cross Campus senior school took a ‘no excuses’ approach to student management, and academic improvement followed.
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We were in pretty dire straits academically. We had to start thinking about why we were not even competing at the same level as other decile 1 schools, and came to the conclusion that we just had to get things done in a type of sequence.
There was a really strong excuse model for everything, such as under-achievement, poor behaviour, poor personal standards – those kinds of things. There was always some sort of an excuse. I have this approach that we are a 'no excuse' school, especially as we are a decile 1 school. So many of the excuses are taken away.
Raise standards
We wanted to build some sense of pride that we stood here strongly and in our own identity within the campus. We focused on attendance and punctuality, and made very strong statements about behaviour and expectations. It was all standards talk, always tempered with humanity, laughter, and friendliness. The kids came on the journey with us very quickly. They kind of wised up to the idea that it was good to be in a real school. They talked about it like that, but for me that was setting the scene, getting the standards right. We worked at not putting anything out there with our kids that wasn't of the highest quality.
We had a British parliamentarian visit and so we decided to devise our own kind of Pasifika welcome. The kids practised their speeches and songs over and over again so that, by the time he got here, it was perfect. It was the first time the senior school was on major show. It was lovely. Everybody was able to see and share the belief that we were a good school.
That was the beginning of it all and then the real stuff had to follow. We really strengthened our curriculum committees, especially literacy. We also developed an achievement committee. We also worked on links with the middle school, starting the transitions and the alignment.
Target interventions
The data work continued. PATs (Progressive Achievement Tests) were the main thing we used and, with the staff, we decided on two target groups.
The first group was the stanine 3–4 kids because, in Mangere, many of the students are about two stanines below the national average. With the national average on stanine 5, our kids were averaging at stanine 3, which made their possibilities at NCEA and higher very limited. We decided that we'd put a huge emphasis into tipping these students over to the average stanine to give them a chance. We STAR-tested them (Supplementary Tests of Achievement in Reading) so we could get more details about what the real issues were.
From there, we implemented two big programmes – one was SuccessMaker. The second thing was that two of my staff devised a literacy programme called TMT (Teasing Meaning from Text), focusing on the reading comprehension and the textual work that was causing so many of the problems.
The second group we decided to look at was the accelerate students. We gathered a very small group of about eight or nine accelerate students and put them in a group called 'Sparks'. We set them off on some extension programmes and gave them a few other little bonuses, such as problem-solving days and excursions into Auckland to go to museums and art galleries. For 2004, we targeted that they would attain 100 per cent in NCEA Level 1 and that each one of them would get at least a minimum of five excellence grades.
Learning comes first
If you take the foot off the accelerator for one thing, it tends to slide back and regress. So you have to have huge energy to keep up and then keep pushing on with the learning. But I think what's happening more than anything is that we're trying to embed a learning culture in everything we do.
On the premise that learning comes first here, we are insisting that every student who wants to go out on school activities or go and do other things has to be work-compliant before they're allowed to go. We're running an assessment checkpoint system. Every six weeks, there's a checkpoint and every teacher is required to put to their HOD the names of any students who have not completed their work. Those names can't come to me unless every department has provided catch-up opportunities at lunchtime or after school. So the students have to go to catch up.
Saturday school
If they've still not completed work, their names are then forwarded to me, and then I run Saturday school. It's compulsory and you must comply, regardless of whether you've got sport or anything. We've even had a couple of First XV rugby players. I run it because it's to support my staff and to tell my kids that learning matters all the way through. At Saturday school, the teachers provide me with all the work that was missing and the kids just sit down. One of the reasons it works so well is because the kids like it. And all these kids who aren't behind also want to come and do Saturday school.
The first time I was supposed to start at 9.00 am and I spent my first Saturday here at 8.00 am because some little lovely said, "Couldn't we come a little bit earlier and do a bit more?" For our kids, this has been a big change – that learning comes before anything else.
Support success
In the accelerate group, we have a very interesting young man. He was in the 99th percentile for reading comprehension. He was exceedingly bright, but was in the behaviour modification class because he was also exceedingly naughty, using his brains for all sorts of interesting purposes. I pushed him out of that class and put him into one of the top band classes.
Now, he doesn't like change, so it took him about three or four months to consistently go to his classes. He moaned and groaned and came every day with the reasons he couldn't and wouldn't. Now he's in year 11 and we've retained a very top academic young Māori man who was teetering. He's still with us. He's still focused. He's talking about university and he still teeters and he waivers and we have to give him top-ups of confidence and belief and reel him back in again periodically, but he's there.
When I tell them all the time that learning's the thing that comes first in our school, we're not getting resistance, which suggests to me that there's an innate sense of our school getting better. I had a student who came here before and, when we met up at a cultural event, she told me, "I wish our school was like this before, because I would have liked it if we had been made to do all these things." So you know the talk's kind of there.
Students love learning
The strategies are starting to be embedded in the students' view that learning is the important stuff of school. Kids make you laugh. I sent some boys down the road to buy my lunch at a bakery recently and, as they were running out, one of them yelled out over his shoulder to me, "Will I get any credits for this?" And now that's one of the buzzes in school – when kids are talking about credits – and in our school that didn't happen before. So they're talking about it. It's in their thinking.
I feel like we're just at the beginning and that this is nowhere near enough. My kids are capable of anything any other kids can do, and they know it. So our goal is to get to the national average and beyond, and celebrate every step on the way. I have absolute belief that these students can do all the same things their peers can do, and that they have other talents as well. It's quite a magical mix.
When you walk in here, I want you to know who we are, and we're not there yet. We want our kids to be able to stand proud in both of our worlds. So our next step is to create an environment that says, you know, we are diverse and we're proud and we know who we are so we're heading there. And within that is 'we're achievers'.
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