Latest news with #EpsomGirlsGrammar
NZ Herald
5 days ago
- Politics
- NZ Herald
Editorial: NCEA reform is a once-in-a-generation opportunity
Epsom Girls Grammar announced in May that it would start its Cambridge International exams pilot next year after being flooded with 'overwhelming community demand'. Mount Albert Grammar School principal Patrick Drumm has said his school was also under growing pressure to offer Cambridge exams from parents concerned the NCEA lacked 'rigour'. Meanwhile, the Education Review Office (ERO) has called the NCEA 'difficult to understand' and said it doesn't prepare students for future achievement. It would be tough to argue that change isn't required. When NCEA was introduced between 2002 and 2004, it was designed with the idea that each student was unique, and it offered flexibility in what students could study and demonstrate achievement and competence in. That was a shift away from the blunter, one-size-fits-all system that was School Certificate and Bursary. Education Minister Erica Stanford said this week, 'This has come at the cost of developing the critical skills and knowledge they need for clear pathways into future study, training or employment'. NCEA has often been criticised for being too hard to follow and inconsistent across students and schools. It is a different world from the one in which NCEA was designed, and whatever your view, we now have the opportunity to design a better way of assessing and preparing students for life after school. And so it is good to see acceptance of the need for change, even from those more sympathetic towards NCEA. Chris Abercrombie, president of the Post Primary Teachers' Association (PPTA), while saying NCEA should 'evolve' rather than be destroyed, said 'Reform is necessary – but it must be thoughtful, inclusive and evidence-based". Opposition leader and former Education Minister Chris Hipkins warned against taking a backward step but admitted there was 'clear evidence that NCEA is not operating as intended and there is change required'. He didn't want the debate to become 'ideological' or 'unnecessarily political'. And that will be the key to developing whatever replaces NCEA. The world is rapidly changing, and all concerned parties need to come to the table to ensure New Zealand's secondary education system is enduring and fit for purpose in 2030 and beyond.
NZ Herald
18-07-2025
- General
- NZ Herald
Epsom Girls Grammar to offer Cambridge as fears grow top schools could abandon NCEA
Epsom Girls Grammar is set to offer its students Cambridge exams in 2026, as another top Auckland principal worries high schools are increasingly 'abandoning' the national curriculum. Epsom Girls Grammar announced in May it would start its Cambridge International pilot next year after being flooded with 'overwhelming community demand'. Mount
NZ Herald
24-05-2025
- Entertainment
- NZ Herald
The Start of The Golden Weather: Andrew Dickens remembers a special theatre performance
Takapuna Beach on Auckland's North Shore, rumoured to be the setting of The End of the Golden Weather. Canterbury's Court Theatre has just opened its spiffing new building with a production of Bruce Mason's The End of the Golden Weather. It's an iconic New Zealand performance piece. Witten as a novella, The End of the Golden Weather is set at a mythical Kiwi beach in Auckland during the Depression of the 1930s. It's the story of a boy growing up and coming of age and witnessing his community and family cope with hard times in an idyllic place. It's also the story of a loner called Firpo, who dreams of success by running in the Olympic Games – a delusion, but for a moment he becomes a hero in the boy's eyes. Mason wrote the piece in the 1950s and then toured the country performing it solo. The first time he did that was in 1959. He went on to perform it more than a 1000 times in community halls the length and breadth of the country. It was made into a film in 1991 by Ian Mune. The recently deceased Raymond Hawthorne fashioned it into a piece for a theatre company in the '80s. But that was not the first time a company performed it. That honour belongs to a school production by Auckland Grammar and Epsom Girls Grammar in 1980. I know because I was in it. I was Firpo. I was 17. Freda Mitchinson from EGGS was the architect, with help from John Heyes at Grammar. Their ambition was spurred on by the success of the previous year's production of Death of a Salesman, which featured knock-out performances from kids who went on to make names for themselves. Simon Prast was Willie Loman, Rima Te Wiata the scarlet lady (aka The Woman) and Finlay MacDonald, later Listener editor, played Happy. We had a narrator, a boy called Tim, but that's all I remember. He was very good. He was our Bruce Mason. The boy at the heart of it was played by Andrew Laxon, a fourth former at the time. He's now a senior member of staff at the Herald. His character was an allegory of New Zealand coming of age. He was sweet and confused at the growing comprehension of adult life that was coming at him like a train. Miss Effie Brent was played by Liz Mullane, who became the New Zealand casting director for The Lord of the Rings. And me. The scripts were the books that we were all issued with. Our lines underscored with pencils, and our annotations in the margins. A lot of the stage direction was verbal, and we just had to remember it. The real genius of the production was the design in the Centennial Theatre. Much of the tale is recalled as memory. Later productions handle the shift from the present to past with lighting colour changes – golden yellowy lighting for memories. In 1980 we masked half the stage with a wall of muslin. When the lights were in front of it, it was a wall. When the lights were brought up behind it, the scenes became visible through a gauzy haze. No one has tried that since. It was magic. Our production was dark. We included the 1932 Auckland riots, something the film omitted. Firpo was deeply challenged mentally. The picture here is my only photographic evidence of the role, taken from the audience with a Kodak Instamatic. Alone in a spotlight screaming the 'Made Man' monologue at the heart of the character; I was shocked by my own intensity and the flying spittle. I had never wailed like that in real life, I was subsumed. A young Andrew Dickens as Firpo in Auckland Grammar's The End of the Golden Weather. Photo / supplied Bruce Mason himself came to see the final dress rehearsal, only two years from his death and ravaged by a stroke. He died before the Raymond Hawthorne production, so this was the only time Mason saw his creation as a play with a full company. I remember him watching silently with his half-collapsed face. He said nothing because he could not say anything, but we were told he enjoyed it. I am immensely proud of the production, its ambition and how it formed me. It was then I realised I had a performance gene, which later came out in my radio career. A girl called Helen Wild played the psychologist who committed Firpo to an asylum. She became my girlfriend and later the mother of my children. We're still together 45 years on, and we still joke that she committed me, once upon a time. I don't know whether schools take production risks the way the two grammars did back in the day. We would do a Gilbert and Sullivan for mass participation and general snogging but then put a serious drama on later in the year. It was the serious drama that forged and inspired the actors like Simon Prast and Rima Te Wiata to embark upon their journeys in drama. It's a reminder that kids don't need to be cosseted. Kids grow when challenged. Pressure makes diamonds. We can all become a Made Man.
