How should I, as a principal, respond when I discover that the results of my 2010 matric class are not what I had hoped for?
Many high school principals face the same challenge each year after they collect the large brown envelope containing their National Senior Certificate (NSC) results and open it to find that fewer of their candidates have passed or achieved bachelors passes than they had anticipated.
It is always important to analyse the results of your NSC candidates because their results provide a valid externally set benchmark of your school’s performance.
If your own internal standards of assessment are where they should be, there should be only small differences between the results that your candidates achieve in the NSC examinations and those that they achieved earlier in the internally set and marked papers of June and September.
If this is not the case, you need to take a good, hard look at your internal standards.
One of the best and simplest ways to do this analysis is to prepare a table (see below) for each subject.
If your internal standards are in line with the standards of the NSC examinations, the figures in each of the columns should be fairly similar. In the better performing schools, you would normally find on average that the results achieved by candidates in the NSC examinations are 3% to 5% better than their results in their final internal examination.
This produces a similar small but significant improvement in the final NSC averages for each subject. If the subject average of any subject is more than 5% lower than the subject average for the NSC examinations then you have a problem and further investigation is essential because it is likely that the teachers of that subject are either not setting papers of a sufficiently high standard or there is a problem with the quality of their teaching and their internal assessment.
Where this is the case, it is best to invite someone with experience and expertise in teaching the subject to thoroughly investigate the standard and quality of the work of that subject team.
This could be a subject adviser from your district office or, better still, an experienced subject head from a school that performs consistently well in that subject.
Besides this detailed analysis of your results, you also need to consider the extent to which the learning environment of your school may be affecting the quality of teaching and learning.
The following questions will help you to uncover some of the possible reasons for your school’s underperformance, provided you are brutally honest in your answers. It is important to remember in formulating your answers that good results are the product of five years of good teaching and not of one year of intensive cramming.
Alan Clarke is a former principal of Westerford High School in Cape Town and author of the Handbook of School Management and the Handbook for School Governors. See www.ednews.co.za