Trident High School is proud of our 2020 NCEA results and know that they are a reflection of both the robust and authentic programmes we have constructed to meet the needs of our students and the quality of our teaching staff. With a renewed focus on equitable educational success, strong leadership, a clear direction and a staff that are all looking to enable students to reach their potential, we know our students have the best possible chance to reach their full potential in 2021.
Recently NCEA released statistics that enable us to compare Trident’s NCEA performance in 2020 with that of all the schools in the Bay of Plenty region. While we were already proud of our performance we now know that our students have performed better at every level than the regional average. We do however, see a space that we must step into to reach equitable success measures for our students. We have always celebrated the NCEA results of our non-Maori students who consistently achieve at high levels at Trident, this is a space we are comfortable in and acknowledge that we do well. The flip side of this space is that we also acknowledge that we must continue to work harder towards increasing the attainment levels of our Maori students. Nationally we know that Maori students are attaining NCEA Level 1, 2 and 3 at lower rates than European students and we at Trident do not believe this trend can continue. We have put in place programmes and systems that work towards eliminating this gap. Our goal for Maori students sitting NCEA Level 1 this year is to have a 90% attainment rate. This is a considerable increase from our 2020 results where 77% of Maori students achieved Level 1 at Trident but one we are confident we can achieve. Our 90% target sits 22% higher than the regional average of 68%.
Due to the disparity in attainment levels Nationally we see that the statistics that NCEA has released compare Maori, European, Pacific People’s, Asian, Middle Eastern with Other Ethnicities. We have taken these statistics and are able to demonstrate how well we achieve compared to the Bay of Plenty averages and highlight that while we are not satisfied with where our Maori student attainment levels are, we do sit considerably higher than the regional average from Level 1 right through to University Entrance results.
At Trident, 77% of our Year 11 Maori of students attained Level 1 which is 9% above the region's average of 68%, while the 93.2% attainment rate of our European students sit 10.2% above the region's average of 83.4%.
Our Year 12 Maori students had a 80.3% attainment rate for NCEA Level 2 placing them 3% higher than the region's average while European students topped the average by 6.9% with a 92.7% attainment rate.
Our Year 13 Maori students sitting NCEA Level 3 came out a staggering 19.4% above the region's average with a 86.7% attainment rate with European students sitting 11.6% higher at 90.6%.
At University Entrance level we see a similar trend with Trident Maori students attaining 10% higher than the average with 46.7%. University Entrance for European also sits higher than the region average at 10.3% higher with 68.8%.
Clearly Trident is achieving pleasing results when compared with other similar schools but we are also dedicated to raising our Maori student achievement to match the achievement rates of our Pakeha students. The achievement and ability to excel for each and every student at the school, is paramount to us.