Principal's Page

Kia Ora Friends                    

We are entering a very busy time of year. Teachers have been completing comprehensive assessments and evaluations and combining these with their own personal judgements and understandings to compile individual end-of-year reports for each child.

Colleagues check those reports. Team Leaders then compare the final reports with the Achievement data in Hero to ensure they are an accurate reflection. Finally, those reports come to either our Deputy Principals, LSC or myself for a final check.

A great deal of thought, reflection and consideration go into these documents.

This week, I was privileged to sit in on the decision process for our Year Six Graduate Awards. The process began with a shared document listing all the awards that all staff had the opportunity to nominate. Staff nominated lots of students and gave their considered reasons for their nominations.

A shortlist of nominations was drawn up from this document and our senior team's own nominations.

The Year Five and Six Team and I then met for an hour and a half to finalise the major award winners for this year. It was an exceptionally thorough and robust discussion. Teachers made their cases; they focused on facts and specifics rather than feelings to ensure the best decisions were made. 

It was tough. There were a number of really worthy candidates for each award, and in many cases, the decision came down to very fine margins. Still, the final decisions were collaborative and agreed to by all.

One really exciting development is a new initiative that came from Mr Taura. Tim wanted us to consider how we could tie our Foundation Stones - Pōhatu Tūmu - into the awards. He wanted them acknowledged, but we were not keen to add another five awards to a pretty comprehensive current list.

The solution was to make the connection between current awards and our stones. After a lot of thought and discussion, we connected the four stones to current awards and arrived at one new award that reflected the fifth stone.

The existing awards and their connections are:

• Citizenship                                - Whānaungatanga
• Cultural                                      - Tūrangawaewae
• Love to Learn to Lead            - Whakamana
• Kindness                                    - Manaakitanga

The New Award:

• True to Self and Others          - Whakapono

I am really excited that we have made connections in this way. It is another powerful way of embedding these values into the kaupapa of our kura. Our four existing trophies will have the appropriate Pōhatu Tumu name engraved onto them, and Mrs Lupe will choose a new trophy for Whakapono. 

Kudos to our Junior School

Last week, we had a new team from the Education Review Office in Wellington and Auckland come and spend a very full day with us, observing and interviewing our Junior School Teachers and meeting with our Junior School Leaders and Senior management.

ERO are writing a guide for all schools in New Zealand on best practice in teaching Oral Language in junior school classrooms. They focused on our approach to developing Oracy through a Structured Play-Based Approach to Learning.

We have recently completed our latest Education Review Office Review, and our Review Officer was absolutely blown away by what she saw here. She wrote two letters to Christopher Luxon, recommending he visit our school to see best practices in Literacy and Numeracy.

She also shared her commendations with her head office colleagues in Wellington, which resulted in us being featured in their latest nationwide report to schools.

It is really encouraging to see the exceptional leadership of Annette Pram and Dana Taylor and the exceptional practice of their teams, being recognised nationally in this way.

Teacher Only Day - Friday 24 November:

Every school in New Zealand has to hold a Teacher Only Day (on the revised New Zealand Curriculum) in the second half of November. 

We tried hard to coordinate with other schools but, in the end, had to go with the day that worked best for us - Friday, 24 November.

NO school for children on this day.

As always - if you have questions or concerns about anything school-related - email me at macash@mac.com, and I will get back to you asap.

My very best regards to you all,

Ash Maindonald

Principal.