Te Kuiti High School

The school

Te Kuiti High School is a close-knit community school of around 350 students in the rural Waikato, an hour south of Hamilton. With 65% of students identifying as Māori and a genuinely diverse community around it, the school's vision is to prepare connected learners who give positively back to their community. Principal Gareth Williams has led the school for the past five years.

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Their challenge

• No reliable way to track student progress and achievement, or to know whether the school was being properly informed by data - "how we tracked that was one of the areas we were trying to look at, how we could be better informed through the data we could get".

• No clear, teacher-level visibility into what quality teaching actually looked like in practice, so strengths couldn't be celebrated and specific gaps couldn't be targeted.

• PLD decisions were being made without a data-backed rationale, so staff had no way of seeing why a particular focus area had been chosen, versus it feeling arbitrary

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How they implemented Pivot

Rather than roll out Pivot to the whole school at once, Gareth ran a pilot with six teachers first. Their enthusiasm for the personalised, confidential reports gave him the confidence, and the internal champions, to open it up school-wide. 27 of the school's 28 teachers opted into the first full survey cycle.

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The impact

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Teachers: 

• Professional development moved from generic, one-size-fits-all delivery to something individualised and genuinely relevant. 

• Teachers began forming their own peer groups around shared growth areas, entirely unprompted, a sign of the teacher agency Gareth had been trying to build across the school.

Leaders: 

• At a leadership level, Gareth is now able to put a genuine spotlight on the areas the school needs to target, replacing a more generic approach to PD planning. 

• It also gives him a clear, evidence-backed rationale to bring to staff for why particular PLD is happening.

Students: 

• Feedback isn't just collected, it visibly shapes what teachers change, giving students a genuine stake in their own learning environment.

• Year 9 students (the newest to the school) gave the least positive feedback in cycle 1, but were notably more positive by cycle 2. Older students also matured in how they engaged with the process after initial cynicism: after staff spent more time explaining why genuine feedback mattered, second-cycle responses were more considered.

• While acknowledging it's early and correlational, Gareth has seen a marked lift in engagement among Year 11 students (the first year of the qualifications pathway), including more students actively tracking their own progress and asking what they need to do to succeed, in a low socioeconomic community where early leaving has historically been common.

Why have you recommended Pivot to other schools in your network?

“Keeping something to yourself that's clearly going to benefit students never sat right with me. We're seeing real benefits for both staff and students, and it's giving us data we wouldn't otherwise have. When I talk to other principals about it, they're genuinely receptive, and I'm glad some of them have made contact.”

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Advice for other school leaders hesitating

“Just take the step and have a go. The data is great and really helpful, but the hidden success is the buy-in from staff, and the engagement it's created.”