Upward trend for Pāpāmoa College NCEA results

A move to modular classrooms has helped NCEA achievement says Pāpāmoa College principal Iva Ropati.

Pāpāmoa College principal Iva Ropati believes an emphasis on higher standards has resulted in significant NCEA improvement across all levels based on provisional data from last year.

The school’s percentage point improvement from the previous year at each level of the qualification is the best in the region, outperforming every other local secondary school, he says.

“Despite a national decline in NCEA around the country, Pāpāmoa College bucked the trend and presented some impressive new year results.

“There were a number of factors that have culminated in the pleasing improvement.”

He says the school community, staff and students have been fully united in the desire for the school to reinvent itself.

“For too long it was a place that had lost its way and needed to realign itself with some critically important priorities. Far too many students were not achieving — some leaving with little or no qualifications.”

Last year the school started to turn things around and staff are now seeing a very different culture of learning.

“It undertook many school improvement reviews and inquiries and facilitated a huge amount of community workshops to ensure partnerships were in place before any change occurred.”

Iva says the biggest factor in the school’s revival has been its commitment to its learners.

“The school has somewhat returned to a more traditional model of teaching and learning. While a modern learning physical environment has its place in education, Pāpāmoa College decided to deliver a curriculum more fundamentally within a more single-cell classroom space environment.

All senior NCEA classes are now accommodated in modular classrooms.

“The school board appreciates the vast improvement and formally acknowledged all staff for their effort to make Pāpāmoa College the school of choice but has also reiterated the need not to rest on what has currently been achieved but to sustain and exceed the results further next year.

Provisional results indicate that at Pāpāmoa College there has been a 15.3 percentage point increase at level 1, a 3 percentage point increase at level 2, a 13.1 percentage point increase at level 3 and a 14.1 percentage point increase at University Entrance.

Iva took over as principal at the start of term 4 in 2022. It was his first principalship outside Auckland.

He was previously principal at Howick College where he started in 2010 and before that he was principal of One Tree Hill College for seven years. He was deputy principal at Onehunga High School from 2000 until 2002.

He moved to the United Kingdom in the early 1990s to play rugby league professionally. It was there he picked up his first teaching job.