Review of Secondary Schools' use of NCEA professional development resources 2005-2006.

In 2005, the Ministry of Education funded a programme of professional development to support the implementation of Scholarship and the National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA) for the period June 2005 to July 2006. This package of support built on the work of teachers and schools over the previous four years of NCEA implementation and included needs-based professional learning for schools or clusters of schools. The methodological approach taken to evaluate the school or cluster based NCEA professional development was multi-faceted and utilised several different sources of data. The researchers gathered information from 28 schools, 11 of which were case study schools. The schools were selected to be a representative sample of state and state integrated secondary schools in New Zealand. The summary of findings is organised into four areas: needs analysis, the nature of professional development programmes, perceptions of changes in schools as a result of the professional development, and ongoing development.