We first met Hastings Girls’ High School principal, Catherine Bentley in 2020, to learn about her school's move to end streaming. We met with Catherine again in mid-2025 to check in on progress. It has been a challenging five years with Covid and Cyclone Gabrielle hitting the region hard and causing enormous disruption to the school but despite the challenges Catherine is proud of what her school has achieved. She generously shared her thoughts and learnings.
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What was your motivation to move away from streaming?

“It’s not the same space as it was, is probably the starting point,” she says. “People focus on taking away the streaming, but we don’t even think about it. Streaming is like a big wall – that’s all you can see. If you take it away - it’s like a blank canvas. You create it. You have a palette of primary colours, but it takes skill to create an artwork.

“For me, ending streaming was one thing, but it's what do you put in its place, so that’s what we've been invested in is creating a structure, because the streaming part is the structure, and then within that structure, building the curriculum and developing the pedagogy that allows that curriculum to occur.

What was the approach you took to making the shift?

Our new structure allows students, for the most part, to be self-determining when they come in. It's the complete opposite of the organised structure that was there before, which was imposed upon them because of the outcomes of one or two tests on the day. Our new structure allows students to start navigating their own pathway through the school. We have a series of five pou or hubs. (For example) there's visual and performing arts and the great outdoors. 

So that's your structure, and then you have your curriculum. I love curriculum, so I'm really fortunate that I had that knowledge. There must be someone on that senior leadership team that's an expert in curriculum and we’ve created a tool that helps build curriculum. 

We drive our own professional learning, and we make those decisions as a senior leadership team about what's needed, and you've got the expertise in your school – like our specialist classroom teachers. We are using HiTS (High Impact Teaching Strategies) which comes from Australia and each hub focuses on one HiTS a term, like questioning.

Whānau engagement is one of the key components of success – it might be like the design and innovation hub. Let's have a market day. Let's have an evening where we can sell our products and whānau can come along and buy them. Or it might be performing arts. Let's put on a showcase, and whānau can come along and watch us perform on stage.

What does success look like?

But how do we know we're making a difference? How do we measure? We have started working towards creating common assessment tasks with rubrics of success criteria, model answers, etc. They have started rolling out this term, and that is huge.

In 2021, Hastings Girls High School was the recipient of the Prime Minister's Excellence in Leading Award. The citation referred to:

• Transformational leadership
• Developing high trust relationships with Māori and Pacific communities
• Junior subject hubs focusing on students’ interests
• Class streaming replaced
• University Entrance achievement for Māori and Pacific learners has reached parity with other students