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.
Does each subject team meet regularly (weekly or fortnightly) to plan what they are to teach and assess, and to discuss ways of helping learners who are struggling?
Are minutes kept of these meetings so that you as principal can monitor that the subject team is focusing its discussion on promoting high standards of teaching, learning and assessment?
Do you read the minutes and discuss them with your subject heads?
Has the subject head and/or members of the subject team made contact with subject heads of other schools, particularly those that produce good results, to get ideas about how they approach their teaching?
Is the quality of teaching in grades eight to 11 providing learners with the basic competencies that they need to master the subject and perform well in their grade 12 year?
Is the school providing learners with the resources they need to succeed, including textbooks (one a learner in each subject), stationery and other requirements such as calculators?
Is the school making the best use of teaching time or is learning regularly interrupted by other activities such as sporting and cultural events, and administrative tasks?
Do all learners receive quality teaching at each lesson, in every subject, or are they frequently not taught because their teachers are not at school?
Are learners given homework on a daily basis in most subjects (one to two hours a day in grades eight and nine, and at least three hours a day in grades 10, 11 and 12)?
Is this homework checked on a daily basis by each subject teacher and is action taken against those learners who do not complete homework?
Are learners provided with a venue at school that they can use for purposes of study and homework in the afternoons after the end of the school day?
Do teachers help learners who struggle with work?
Are the results achieved by individual learners each term analysed to identify the reasons for underperformance, and are these reasons conveyed to the learners and their parents with appropriate advice on what must be done to improve? Telling learners to “work harder” is insufficient. They need to be provided with specific details and help with those aspects of the work that they need to improve.
Are the subjects learners choose to take in grade 10 best suited to their ability and interests? This applies particularly to their choice of mathematics or mathematical literacy and to their decisions to take subjects such as physical science and accounting, which require a solid grounding in mathematics.
Finally, have you as the principal of the school looked in the mirror and asked yourself what it is that you have or have not done that has led to the poor results? We say this because there is strong evidence from research to show that it is the school principal who has the single greatest influence on the quality of teaching and learning in a school.
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