The turnaround: Inside the Auckland schools winning at what NZ keeps getting wrong
Sunday, 28 June 2026
While the country's results slide, three Auckland schools have been recognised for bucking the trend, lifting achievement for the students most often written off. Amelia Wade reports on what they're doing differently.
Rozanne Donald cried in January when she saw her school's exam results. All the students, teachers and the leadership team's efforts were there in black and white.
“I was so happy about them, because every single level ‒ 1, 2, 3 and UE ‒ all went above the national benchmarks.“
In just two years, Rutherford College in Auckland's Te Atatū began to turn around its persistent achievement inequity.
In 2023, the pass rates for year 10s sitting the NCEA literacy and numeracy co-requisites revealed massive disparities. Just 29% of Māori students and 35% of Pasifika passed, compared with 60% of European students.
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The school dug into its data and worked out that when the students entered the school, those disparities were not present. That indicated the problem was not primarily one of student capability, but of the effectiveness of teaching and learning within the school.
“If you're a 13-year-old who's not very good at writing, you go to seven different classes in a week and you've got seven different ways of learning how to write a paragraph.
“Even though you're still struggling with writing, you're also supposed to master the teacher's favourite way of teaching paragraphs, which puts a ridiculous barrier in your way for the sake of the teacher using their favourite tool,” said Donald.
Rutherford College decided to make literacy inequities the whole school's problem because Māori and Pasifika learners represent about 48% of its student population.
Donald had worked with Distinguished Professor Emeritus Viviane Robinson and knew her Collaborative Complex Problem Solving methodology, which she used to understand what the problem was.
It began with the senior leadership team doing more than 100 classroom walk-throughs in 2024, which showed the teaching of literacy was limited and highly inconsistent.
That investigation found that when asked to describe good teaching, staff tended to talk about their relationships with students rather than evidence-based teaching methods; approaches to literacy varied widely from classroom to classroom; and teachers had had few chances to build a shared understanding of structured literacy across the school.
Last year, the school refined its inquiry, gathered student voices and found 26% of students often felt lost or confused in the classroom.
The school shifted to evidence-informed explicit literacy instruction, and the whole teaching staff undertook professional learning and development focused on the science of learning, including cognitive load, retrieval practice and explicit instruction.
The results spoke for themselves.
For Pasifika students, level 1 NCEA achievement increased from 40% in 2023 to approximately 71% in 2025. Māori achievement also increased significantly, reaching 72% in 2025.
Donald says there's more work to do, but she's heartened by the efforts and knows it's life-changing for kids and all the adults invested in their lives ‒ the parents, aunties and uncles.
“It might only be 15 Pasifika kids, but their passing affects the whole community around them, and they're so proud of it,” she said.
“It literally gives them different options for life. We don't have proper equity yet, but we're working on it.”
New Zealand's school results have been sliding for much of the past two decades.
NCEA has taken much of the blame ‒ the Government says it became fragmented and too easy to game, masking what students could really do ‒ and Education Minister Erica Stanford is replacing it, phasing NCEA out between 2028 and 2030 in favour of new subject-based qualifications as part of a wider overhaul of the system.
Stanford has also introduced tougher literacy and numeracy tests and is, controversially in some corners, rewriting the school curriculum into a knowledge-rich framework focused on foundational skills, structured literacy and explicit teaching.
The plan has drawn push-back, including an open letter from 89 secondary principals warning it risks disadvantaging Māori and Pasifika students.
She also launched the inaugural New Zealand Education Excellence Awards to recognise outstanding work across the sector, in part to prompt schools to examine their own practice.
“High-quality teaching has the biggest impact on student outcomes, and strong leadership ensures that great practice is consistent across a school.
“The award commendations, finalists and winners show what is possible when schools focus on evidence-based teaching, set high expectations, and provide the right environment for their community of learners,” Stanford said.
Rutherford College was a finalist alongside Auckland Girls' Grammar and Long Bay College ‒ all Auckland schools ‒ in the secondary category of Excellence in Raising Student Achievement. Auckland Girls' Grammar won.
Auckland Girls' Grammar
The central Auckland girls' school has a history of accepting students from across the city. It's worked to maintain that access, and 84% of its students come from out of zone.
Associate principal Maree Flannery knows the financial and time commitment parents have made to send their daughters there.
“We take that really seriously, to ensure these girls get the absolute best education possible, because such a lot of sacrifices have been made for them to attend.”
A belief shared across the school is that all students will achieve success ‒ not just some, but all.
“So it's teachers believing that all students can achieve, and then teachers working with the students and really ensuring the students believe it too, because sometimes they can have doubts.”
Every fortnight, the leadership team gets together to look at the data to see how students are tracking, which means they can spot struggling students and intervene before they get left too far behind.
“We're student-focused, but you need to have the facts in front of you, and then you can put strategies in place. You don't want to just be guessing ‒ you want to know this is going to make a difference.”
They've also introduced longer learning blocks, called off-timetable days, so students can focus for more than 50 minutes without the interruptions of bells and moving classrooms. One day might be set aside for Japanese, so students work through their assessment and complete it by the end of the day, ready for the teacher to mark.
Initially, faculties worried about their own subjects, but when they needed the same focus, they got a day too.
'That's really allowed students to do better-quality work, probably because they haven't had the interruptions,' Flannery said.
This year, the school says, 100% of its Māori students and 97% of its Pasifika students achieved NCEA level 2 and level 3.
A big focus has been on university entrance. For the past five years, Auckland Girls has brought in two teachers who don't do daily classroom work but instead run a mentoring programme for year 13s who are struggling. There are currently 80 students getting that support ‒ everything from boosting confidence to time management and asking for help.
“The mentors are like a mum at school ‒ someone who's going to be looking out for them.”
The school celebrated as 92% of its students gained university entrance last year.
“It opens doors, and it makes such a difference. That's why we all believe in it so much ‒ because we know it's making a massive difference for these students,' said Flannery.
“The world is there for them when they can leave here with level 3 and University Entrance.”
Long Bay College
About two decades ago, Long Bay College didn't have the best reputation, especially compared with many of its neighbouring schools on the North Shore. But a sustained effort has turned that around.
Principal CJ Healey, who joined the school in 2017, says the change didn't come from arguing that the school's reputation was unfair.
“I quickly learned we couldn't change people's perceptions by stating they were unfair or untruthful. We just had to build something so powerful that people's perceptions would have to change.
“We've been incredibly strategic and deliberate about improving the school at every level,” he said.
The first effort was working on the school's culture, establishing values and having the school stand for something.
“Then we worked very hard on our craft as teachers and our pedagogy, to give the kids better academic outcomes.”
Last year, 95% of Long Bay College's year 13 students achieved NCEA level 3. And in 2024, its Māori and Pasifika students topped all other ethnicities in University Entrance, including New Zealand European and Asian.
It's also achieved well at the top of the achievement spectrum. In the 2025 NZQA Scholarship round, the Torbay school recorded 85 scholarships across 21 subjects, including a Premier Scholar ‒ one of just 13 named nationally ‒ and three Top Subject Scholar awards, among only 40 handed out across the country.
Its University Entrance rate has also risen ‒ a school record ‒ which the college's awards entry puts at 76.6% in 2025, up from 66.7% in 2022.
“Our improvement here hasn't come from one single initiative. It's come from deliberate alignment,” says Healey.
He refers to it as a “quadrangular practice”; four initiatives the school has been working with for more than five years.
“It gives us a shared language of what high-quality teaching and learning looks like, and it sets the expectation that every lesson we deliver is purposeful, knowledge-rich and, importantly, really relational.”
The Tino Akoranga framework sets those shared expectations for teaching. Alongside it, a model of shared responsibility called Mahi Tahi has teachers observe one another's classrooms, built around two questions: what are the students learning, and how do we know?
“The phrase we use is 'improving rather than proving'. It builds collective responsibility in the staff. Our teachers work collaboratively, they observe each other, they share really great practice, and they improve together rather than operating in isolation.”
Healey said that was initially quite confronting for many staff.
The other two corners are quality assurance ‒ real-time data, course analysis and reviews ‒ and professional learning, a well-defined 12-month programme that lets teachers continually refine their practice with evidence.
With the academic results now something to be proud of, the next step for Long Bay is extracurricular activities.
“Already our sporting teams and programmes are achieving at levels they haven't for a long time, if ever.”
The school's reputation is now strong enough that, Healey says, families are buying houses specifically to get into its zone ‒ so much so that it is now almost entirely an in-zone school and no longer takes out-of-zone enrolments.
“It's been the work of many, and we're starting to reap some rewards now, which is wonderful.”