Headmaster's Prize Giving Address

1 December 2011

Chairman of the Board, members of the Grammar community, it is my great privilege and pleasure to present my 19th Annual Report on the work and progress of Auckland Grammar School in its 142nd year.

The School List and Chronicle contain a detailed account of the year’s activities and therefore I will report publicly on only a selected number of matters that have impacted on our School this year.

The School started the year with 2489 students and 147 teachers, and we were delighted overall with our best ever examination results in CIE, and a massive improvement in NCEA Level 3 results.

In the Form 5 IGCSE exam, 95 percent of grades achieved were graded C (60 percent) or better; that is an outstanding result. Of those grades, 69 percent were either A* or A, while two boys gained a Top in the World subject award and four further boys topped New Zealand.

Form 6 and 7 boys also performed well in the very demanding AS exam andresults showed a continuing improvement. Fifty two percent of all grades received were awarded either ‘A’ or ‘B’ passes, two boys topped the World in Classics and French and three additional boys gained Top in New Zealand awards.

The boys who attempted the challenging full AL exam performed superbly. Sixty seven percent of all grades were either A*, A or B and there was a 99 percent pass rate. These are truly magnificent results that compare well with the top UK independent and selective grammar schools and highly regarded international schools across the globe.

NCEA Level 3 results showed a tremendous 13% increase with 69 percent of boys gaining that award. In addition, 71 percent of our NCEA cohort gained University Entrance.

Our boys continue to achieve excellently in the elite New Zealand Scholarship Exam despite the syllabus content in many subjects being different to the ‘A’ Level syllabuses that our top scholars study. One Hundred individual Scholarships were gained and four boys were awarded Overall Outstanding Scholarships and eight gained special Scholarship Awards, a considerable improvement on 2009 results.

To further emphasise the quality of academic results, 46 boys who made the School’s Honours Board last year averaged 90 percent or better in their A Level exams – a stunning record of achievement.

Sport continues to boom in both numbers and achievements with over 500 teams now representing the School in inter-School competition. National titles were harder to come by this year with 1st XI Football, Premier Basketball and Badminton all just missing out on national honours. Congratulations therefore to our national championships winning teams: Table Tennis, Chess, Cross Country, Junior Cycling and of course Rowing. Chess were also crowned Australasian SS Champions yesterday in Melbourne.

The win by the Senior Rowing 8 in the prestigious Maadi Cup race was spectacular and showed that it is possible to have a moment in one’s life when you get everything right: mind, body and spirit combining to produce something beyond our normal capacity.

Watching the boat cross the finishing line ahead of Christ’s College and Westlake Boys’ High School was a very proud moment because this crew had been a credit to Auckland Grammar School all season. Their humility, quiet confidence, dedication, spirit and determination were an object lesson for all other sports teams at School about how to approach their sport.

Thirteen Grammar boys were named as finalist in the ASB Young Sportsperson of the Year Awards and five won their category, more than any other school. Locally there were too many Auckland Championships to name, but I was particularly proud to see our teams win two Auckland Rugby Championships, five football championships while Squash, Table Tennis, Basketball, Cross Country, Chess and Badminton also gained Premier Auckland Championship titles.

2011 has been a busy but a very rewarding year for Auckland Grammar School Music under the leadership of our new HOD, Mr Sherwood. Not only have our instrumental groups carried on with last year’s successes by winning multiple awards at the Auckland Secondary Schools Band & Orchestra Festival, but GrammAccoustix, our choir, gained two placings at the Young Singers in Harmony National Final in Wellington.

Drama also had a very successful year. Our joint production with Epsom Girls’ Grammar School, ‘Oliver’, directed by Mrs Hellens, ran for ten performances. Yet again the students rose to the occasion and an impressive, well-received production was enjoyed by cast, crew and audience alike.

Hot on the heels of ‘Oliver’ was the successful student-run production ‘The Importance of Being Earnest’, and all involved can be extremely proud of their efforts.

It was also great to see the rebirth of the School’s Kapa Haka group under the tutelage of Mr Rehu and with great support from the boys of the United Maori Mission Hostel.

There is no doubt that the cultural life of the School is both vibrant and eclectic and very successful.

The success that our boys gain was recognised by the Education Review Office who visited our School in late August this year. In their overwhelmingly positive report they noted that “high expectations and an ethos of achievement continue to be a well established feature of the School” and that “boys achieve significant successes at regional, national and international levels in a wide range of academic, sporting and cultural endeavours”.

After a comprehensive review of the School, ERO awarded our School the rare top rating which means we will not need to be reviewed for another five years.

To gain this rating, the School had to be highly effective in leadership and management, in teaching quality, in governance and in engaging the community in the life of the school. On top of this students had to be actively engaged in their learning and progressing very well; there had to be a culture of high expectations for students and staff in the school, and the School had to provide a safe and inclusive environment.

The amazing thing about our School is that over 142 years it has consistently been a ‘leader in education’, often a focus for education debate and always competitive at the very top level of academic, sporting and cultural activities.

The result is that Auckland Grammar School holds a special, somewhat independent, niche in the New Zealand education scene, in large part because we have remained constant, determined, committed and totally focused on the things that we believe make us different and special, and which contribute to our boys enjoying an excellent educational experience.

The School stands for a style of education that is definitely not old fashioned or conservative but rather demanding, knowledge-driven, competitive and rigorous. We aim to provide our boys with the structure, values and educational opportunities that will enable them to go to the outside world as well rounded, confident young men who can mix it with the very best and be worldly citizens of our country.

When I took over as Headmaster of Auckland Grammar School in 1993 I was very well aware of the School’s distinctiveness and strengths from my sports coaching contacts with the school and from colleagues who had taught at Grammar.

I also appreciated that Grammar’s strength came from a long standing commitment to a well understood and stated philosophy of education.

Throughout its history, the School has been consistently strong in upholding these beliefs. It is almost as if successive Headmasters have passed the baton from one to the other so that the School continues to fight the good fight.

Over the last 20 years the School has been under great pressure from various governments to be a ‘normal’ State school and abide by Ministry of Education diktats. In this era of manic policy busyness, just about every aspect of education policy in New Zealand has been changed: the funding of schools, the governance of schools, curriculum standards, assessment and testing, the role of government, the range and nature of national agencies and school enrolment regulations.

The fact that we have maintained our philosophical integrity during the massive policy upheavals of the last two decades goes a long way to explaining the continuing success of our School. The fact that the School has had only 10 Headmasters in its 142 year history is also a major factor in this consistency.

In July I was fortunate to be able to attend the 18th Annual Conference of the International Boys’ Schools’ Coalition, hosted by the City of London School in the UK.

The Speaker who had the biggest impact on me was not an educationist but rather the eccentric and charismatic Mayor of London, Boris Johnson.

Johnson has a genuine passion for education and delivered a five point manifesto for education should he ever become the Minister of Education. His address made for an interesting session at the conference. His points are worth repeating:

1. Destroy all the televisions and ‘game boys’. It is only through reading widely he argued, that minds can truly expand.
2. Emphasise afresh the importance of 3 hour examinations. In an era when internal assessment has become increasingly fashionable, it is all too easy to overlook the value of examinations. The importance of thorough revision, the challenge of working under pressure and the objectivity of a similar cohort of students being tested at the same time under similar conditions cannot be undervalued.
3. Encourage again a focus on competitive sport. When channelled correctly, there is clear evidence emerging from studies in both UK and the US that young people involved in sport are also performing much better academically.
4. Learn poetry by heart. Learning things by rote has become distinctly unfashionable in progressive educational circles yet the sheer act of learning something by heart trains the mind in a unique way.
5. Transfer the competitive urge into academic goals. Success in the academic arena should be lauded and acknowledged in a high profile way. While I believe that our students at Auckland Grammar School strongly endorse this view, there are still too few in our own country for whom academic success is placed on the same pedestal as sporting glory.

In effect, with tongue slightly in cheek, Johnson was reminding us all that some educational truths have stood the test of time and we abandon them at our peril. We at Auckland Grammar School do cherish those values which transcend space and time, while at the same time we are open to innovation that will make us even more effective in the future.

Of course, as well as the consistent ‘Grammar Way’ philosophy, a major factor in the School’s success is the staff.

Today I would like to pay tribute to Mrs Lyn Rawlinson, HOD Learning Support, who retires from teaching after 22 years at Auckland Grammar School. The Learning Support Department has, under Lyn’s guidance, grown and developed markedly. From its origins in one room off the Library to its present state-of-the-art home, Mrs Rawlinson has overseen its progress and it now caters for boys with high special needs, and many others with specific learning and autistic spectrum disorders. In 2004 she was awarded the Staff Scholarship, a just reward for her tremendous work and an affirmation of the whole Learning Support Department. Mrs Rawlinson has also, for numerous years, been one of the important pillars supporting Grammar’s drama productions.

She will be sorely missed at Grammar but we wish her everything of the best for her well-deserved retirement.

I would also like to commend Mr Kel White on attaining 50 years of secondary school teaching. Mr White leaves the permanent staff today but will be filling in at various times during next year. He has had a most fulfilling teaching career.

Four teachers have today completed 25 years service to Auckland Grammar School. Dr Jenks, Messrs Bing, Lassche and Thomson have all made a magnificent contribution to our School over these 25 years. It is my privilege to thank them publicly for their devotion, commitment, loyalty and passion for our School.

The importance of the teaching staff at Auckland Grammar School was also noted by ERO who commented that “many teachers demonstrate a passion and enthusiasm for their subject” and that “their subject knowledge and good questioning techniques engage students well in learning.”

It remains a truism that “the quality of an education system cannot exceed the quality of its teachers”, and I remain ever hopeful that teaching in the future can become a priority career choice for top graduates as it used to be in earlier times.

While Auckland Grammar School continues to be a top school, there are issues that the New Zealand Government must face in the senior secondary school generally, the solution to which will eventually impact on our School as well.

We know from international test results that our top scholars are as talented as any in the world.

This fact, however, masks the long and demographically growing education tail of underperformance and disaffection, especially among too many of New Zealand’s 16-18 year olds. This age group in New Zealand have a bigger share of total unemployment than in any other developed nation.

New Zealand’s current and future policy emphasis must be on lifting the performance of our middle and lower echelons of students and getting them as engaged and stimulated as our top scholars because currently 20% of New Zealand school leavers are classified as ‘functionally illiterate’.

This problem is not unique to New Zealand. Governments the world over are currently battling with the issue. One proposal gaining traction in the UK and US is the provision at age 16 of specialist vocational schools for those students not academically inclined. This is a concept that is very common and successful in Finland, Germany, Austria, Norway, Switzerland and Netherlands.

There is a recent precedent in Auckland with the setting up of New Zealand’s first tertiary high school on the campus of Manukau Institute of Technology. It is an idea I believe merits further investigation because our one size fits all comprehensive system of education is currently failing a significant proportion of our students.

While the sentiment of comprehensive education is a noble one, there is a clear and compelling case for a diversity of schools and the creation of more specialist schools. Professor David Hargreaves of Cambridge University talks about “polymorphic education provision” – the creation of a specialist system of education to meet the different talents of all students in the senior secondary school.

I think we need to recognise that we do have to be flexible in the provision of educational opportunities and, at the same time, appreciate the realistic academic potential of the entire student population.

There are other challenges that face our country’s educational system and need to be addressed by governments in the future if we want to regain our place among the upper echelons of those systems regarded as best in the world.

1. Our national qualifications system must be fixed, not continually tinkered with.
2. Our national curriculum needs to be focused on knowledge rather than the current utilitarian skills focus.
3. Governance structure set up by ‘Tomorrow’s Schools’ in 1989 needs a thorough review and subsequent modification.
4. Educational establishment needs to be restructured and made far slimmer.
5. Creation of a serious professional body to lead our teachers so that teachers have the same status as other professions.
6. The evolution of genuinely independent State schools that are subject to ‘accountable autonomy’ (A Fong). This will enable communities to create their own special character schools within this framework.

None of these are overnight quick fixes. But, if we are serious about creating a world leading education system, then a start needs to be made soon.

Auckland Grammar School, I can confidently say, is in great heart and we are well positioned for further progress and development. In April, for example, we can look forward to the start of the construction of a new teaching block adjacent to the Taj toilet block and the Science block, and the subsequent removal of the prefabs on the upper field, a project I have long campaigned for and finally achieved some success.

I am delighted to report also that our liaison with the United Maori Mission is progressing well, and we will have at least 40 boys from their hostel at Auckland Grammar School next year. The boys’ involvement in sport and cultural life of the School has been exceptional, and academically, the majority of boys are making sound progress.

Other projects that will come to fruition in the next five years include a staged refurbishment of the Centennial Theatre and the building of a multi-purpose sports turf where the current No 3 rugby field is located.

These are exciting projects that will continue to add to the wonderful infrastructure of the School.

Our School is so fortunate to have a number of agencies that support the School in a variety of ways.

Of greatest importance is the Board of Trustees that provides wise counsel and careful judgement on all issues affecting the School. The hard work of all members of the Board is greatly appreciated by me and in particular my thanks to Chairman, Jeff Blackburn, for his continued support and encouraging leadership.

The Old Boys’ Association, Headmaster’s Council and Foundation Trust work magnificently for the good of the School and add greatly to our facilities and resources.

I am also appreciative of the generosity of our Grammar families who contribute so well to our various fundraising ventures and in paying the annual school donation. Without this support we simply could not afford to provide the facilities or the educational environment that our boys enjoy at Auckland Grammar School.

Auckland Grammar teachers have worked hard as usual throughout 2011 for their students. High expectations are placed on them as excellence in the classroom is the key to a Grammar education, and that standard has to come from those who teach. Teachers are also expected to be just as committed to the total life of the School in cultural, club and in sporting activities and in their interest in boys’ welfare at school, at home and in the community. The 2011 teachers have done that and I thank them for their hard work and loyalty to the School.

I would like to thank publicly our brilliant non-teaching staff who, by their efforts, keep this complex institution functioning efficiently and effectively week after week. And a particular vote of thanks to my PA, Christina Wilkinson, for her handling of a tremendous volume of work with amazing efficiency and good humour. Her loyalty and commitment over 17 years have been outstanding and I value her contribution to the success of our School very highly.

The Executive team continue to be a strong, talented and stable group. Their hard work, dedication and collegiality are very much appreciated by me.

The Prefect body this year have been united and co-operative, and my thanks to Head Prefect, Nick Orr, and his Deputy, Sam Brothers, for their superb work throughout the year. As the student leader of the School, Nick has been outstanding. As a top academic, excellent sportsman and brilliant debater, he has been an exemplary role model for all the boys in our School. His very special all round talents are indicative of the quality of the 2011 senior school.

Finally, those for whom the School exists: the endless procession of boys – demanding, sometimes impatient of age and authority yet overwhelmingly cooperative, tolerant and amenable to reason, full of energy, at times careless and untidy yet never happier than when being fully extended by their teachers. The great majority of our boys, beneath their nonchalant exterior, are fiercely loyal and appreciative.

My thanks to the boys who make this School, a special school. I applaud you for your goodwill, cooperation, involvement and hard work in the classroom. It is a genuine joy to be associated with such eager, talented, challenging and positive young men.

To those boys who are leaving school today, my best wishes for fulfilment in the years ahead. May you achieve your ambitions and lead rich and positive lives. You have contributed greatly to making 2011 a fine year in the School’s history.

My best wishes to the entire Grammar community for Christmas and the holiday season and for future success.

Per Angusta Ad Augusta
John Morris
Headmaster