Learning About Learning: 

Just a short post today to share a bit of timely good news.

You will have heard our government is focusing on lifting student literacy and numeracy achievement levels through a focus on 'structured literacy' and 'structured numeracy' programmes.

In practice, this means a limited number of 'government-approved' programmes can be used with New Zealand students.

Last week, we received the awesome news that the two numeracy programmes - PR1ME Maths and Numicon -  we use at Western Heights are government-approved and funded.

For the last six years, we have committed close to $20,000 a year to providing these resources for students and teachers. We estimated this cost would rise to $30,000 next year, with new digital-use licences for students and staff also included.

Now, these resources will be government-funded - a tremendous boon for us. 

At the end of last term I spent a couple of weeks visiting some schools in the United States. Seeing innovation and ingenuity from two exceptional schools was a brilliant opportunity. I came back with some cool new ideas - two of them will be trialled early next year in our senior school to start with.

Back in 2018 the South Korean Ministry of Education funded a visit for me to their country. I shared our relational approach to learning and ways that we personalise learning and make it engaging for our children. In return, I observed their use of PR1ME maths. As a result we introduced PR1ME to WHS, and the rest, as they say, is history. Our children, our teachers, and now our government love PR1ME. 

Our big advantage is that while many schools across the country have a steep 'structured numeracy' learning curve ahead of them, we are six years down the track and well set to build on our success.