This week the New Zealand Herald reported that Selwyn College has completely turned their figures around, lifting their NCEA Level 1 pass rate from 39 per cent in 2007, to 93 per cent in 2013. 

But could this relentless focus on figures – be it NCEA, National Standards, or Pisa – be ignoring what is most important?
 
School is more than just a place for academic achievement. It is a place where children develop socially and emotionally. A sense of connection at school is predictive of good social and health outcomes as well as educational outcomes.

The OECD’s Pisa study often comes under fire for its relentless focus on the figures – the reading, mathematics and science scores of 15-year-olds.
 
Yet the OECD does not hide the fact that ‘strong performance in standardised assessments explains only so much of how well students will do later in life’.
 
The things that matter just as much – the personal attributes that will stand students in good stead – are hard to measure. A focus on results need not come at the expense of the softer stuff. Actually, positive social and emotional development, as well as being good in and of itself, should help students to learn and achieve.
 
Teachers know this. Around the world, 69 per cent of school leaders surveyed for the Pisa study believe that their maths teachers consider students’ social and emotional development to be as important as knowledge acquisition in class.
 
It gets really interesting when you look at the differences in attitudes among the top eight maths performers in Pisa (Shanghai, Singapore, Hong Kong, Taipei, Korea, Macao, Japan and Lichtenstein). Overall, school leaders in the top eight performers were more inclined to agree (85 per cent), compared with the other 54 countries in the study (77 per cent), that social and emotional development is as important.
 
Delving deeper still, the nuances are in the strength of agreement. The top eight countries were less likely to ‘strongly agree’ (16 per cent) compared to the rest (24 per cent) but were more likely to ‘agree’ (69 per cent, compared with 54 per cent). They seem to value what they interpret as social and emotional development, but strike a better balance with academic achievement.
 
According to the OECD, students who go to schools with better teacher-student relations have a stronger sense of belonging and a greater intrinsic motivation to learn. And the heartening part of Selwyn College’s rapid and remarkable transformation in the numbers is that every student has a mentor teacher to help them through their schooling. Clearly, they place a value on relationships.
 
Einstein once said that ‘not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted’. These figures, while never perfect, are important indicators of the real learning and development that is happening in our schools.