From the Desk of Tony Williams (Senior Deputy Headmaster – Prep)

Bench-marking in Schools
We are all well aware that today the whole world is one global village. People can chat with others sitting thousands of kilometres away in another country with the click of a mouse. An average mobile can do many things that were not possible on a PC a few years ago. People have become connected without barriers and the removal of such barriers has allowed our boys to become valued participants in the global world of tertiary study and work. 
With this in mind it is essential that we in the educational sector remain connected and part of this global environment. There was a time when parents in South Africa were content to know that their children’s schools were ‘better’ than those in the next neighborhood. As the world has shrunk, though, the next neighborhood is now Shanghai or Helsinki. In developing schools we need to ensure that we are in touch with and implementing tried and tested innovations that allow us to remain a relevant and forward thinking school.
 
One method of ensuring our relevance and standards is through participating in both South African and worldwide benchmarking assessments. Benchmarking in schools is a tool that not only allows a school to know where it stands on the global scale, but more importantly, it gives us a chance to improve and to measure this improvement.  In essence it enables our school to exchange experiences and ideas and to identify and learn from better performing education systems. This allows us to know where we stand as a school in relation to similar schools throughout the world and thereby develop standards of expected performance levels that we can measure and improve on.
 
We as a school continue to ensure that we remain relevant in the global community.  A select group of staff recently left for the International Boys Schools’ Coalition Conference in Vancouver, Canada.  These teachers have and will continue to be part of an action research group that studies and identifies best practice in boys’ schools throughout the world.
 
Furthermore, each year we participate in various benchmarking initiatives throughout the school.  Already this year our Grade 7 boys have written the South African IEB MATCH assessment (Measuring Abilities and Thinking Competencies for High School).  This benchmarking assessment allows us to identify key areas which are essential to develop in our boys before moving to High School. We await feedback from the marking of the assessment and will adapt and strengthen our Prep curriculum based on these results. 
 
Later this year the Grade 3, 6 and 9 boys will write International Benchmark Tests, which are administered by the IEB, in partnership with the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER).  These tests offer schools the opportunity to write benchmarking tests in English, Mathematics and Science.  Such tests will allow us to evaluate and compare how we perform against a global group of similar schools.  ACER is a partner in the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, better known as TIMSS and other international testing environments and hence has substantial experience in assessing the generic skills that underpin Mathematics, English and Science learning at different levels. Scores are place on a continuous scale that matches questions to the international performance expected at a particular level. The diagnostic reports that accompany the results of pupils in these tests are substantial and provide teachers with sufficient information to identify and correct aspects of their teaching, e.g. concepts that might require a different approach in teaching a particular child's weaknesses and strengths.
As we move deeper into the 21^st Century, we will continue to strive to offer the best education possible to the boys in our care to ensure they can leave us with an education that is relevant to the future global workforce needs.