Background
St John's College, Hamilton, is an integrated boys secondary school with a roll of around 700.
Technology teacher Steve Andrew originally qualified as a motor mechanic and after working in the automotive industry for a number of years moved into teaching in 1989. He started teaching Workshop Technology, and felt comfortable making the transition into Design Technology courses because of the freedom it gave teachers and the ownership it gave to students. With the advent of the new Technology curriculum, Steve focussed on giving all boys at St John's College access to programmes suited to their own particular needs and aspirations. "The new Technology Achievement Standards provide an opportunity for us to hold on to those boys in that middle- to top-ability range who seemed to be lost to the subject after Year 12," he says.
Traditionally the Year 13 Technology class at St John's has been a smaller group of students, most having come via a skills-oriented wood- and metal-based materials programme. Year 9 starts with a half-year compulsory course and moves into an optional full Year 10 programme. The senior technology programme begins at Year 11 with two classes of around 20 students doing similar programmes, "but with room for a bit of individual flexibility." These students feed through to one slightly larger Year 12 Materials Technology class with an additional Unit Standards based course also offered at this level. "By this stage they will be confident working with a selection of materials and bring a good tool box of skills through to Year 13 where there's room in the programme to develop specialist skills where required," Steve says.
