Decile one school tops Metro magazine list
McAuley High School, a Catholic decile one school for girls in Otahuhu, has topped the tables in Metro magazine’s annual analysis of Auckland secondary schools.
In its July issue, out last week, Metro says McAuley was the school most likely to improve its students’ performance in exams.
The magazine warns that this is not the same as saying it had the highest proportion of success in exams. That honour, according to the magazine, belongs to three schools: St Cuthbert’s College in NCEA exams, ACG Senior College in the Cambridge exams, and ACG Parnell College in University Entrance.
Metro used a unique analysis to produce its figures. “Our way of presenting the data gets way beyond the problems with most league tables,” said Metro editor Simon Wilson.
“First, we put all the schools together in decile groups. Family standard of living determines the decile level of each school,” he said. “Like it or not, that has a major impact on students’ success. So you have to allow for it.”
The magazine did this by finding an average for each decile group, and comparing each school against that average.
“This reveals how likely it is for each school, that students will do better than you might expect, given their backgrounds,” said Wilson.
“It’s an important measure of what educators call ‘added-value’,” he said. “We’ve identified not just how well students do, but how much of their achievement is probably because of their school.”
“Of course, in addition to revealing the best schools, our analysis also shows up the worst,” he added. “We have named schools that actually make it less likely a student will achieve to the level you should expect, relative to other schools.”
Metro’s core findings are based on University Entrance, which is not an exam, but a standard set by the Ministry of Education. “Schools don’t often tell you this, but every school leaver in the country gets a UE grade: pass or fail. It’s the only genuinely universal measure of achievement in our system,” said Wilson.
McAuley High School had a University Entrance pass rate of nearly double the decile one average, and its rate of merit and excellence awards in Level 1 NCEA was over three times the decile one average.
“This school has a truly remarkable level of achievement,” said Wilson. “Over half its school leavers gain UE. There are many high-decile schools that hardly do any better.”
Wilson said that McAuley is not the only Catholic school to show up well in Metro’s findings.
“That’s one of the big success stories. Catholic schools of all kinds dominate the top places in our tables: boys’, girls’ and co-ed, high decile and low.
“Maybe they’re putting brain juice in the communion wine. Whatever it is, our results suggest that if New Zealand is going to get serious about the ‘long tail of failure’ in schools, we need to look closely at why Catholic schools are doing so well.”