Principal News

Education in the News

Educational issues have been in the news over the last two weeks.

The Ministry of Education has released a new parent portal. The goal of the portal is to help you "Understand what your child is learning at school or kura, how they are progressing against the curriculum, and what you can do to support them at home."

The portal provides some good advice, and I note with interest that the first Year 7 goal is to learn their times tables. As you know, we have all been working on this, as it is a significant barrier to accessing the rest of the Year 7 and 8 mathematics curriculum.

As much as tools like this can be useful, if you are unsure of how your child is doing or what else you can do to help, talking to your child's classroom teacher is still the best place for information.

This is the first year all New Zealand schools have dealt with the new mathematics curriculum expectations. The teachers have been working hard to understand where your child fits in the new expectations. As we have mentioned before, we are expecting to see a considerable drop in performance due to the higher standards. Once we have collected all of the data, we will be able to understand how much of a drop we have had and what the trends are. We will share this information at a parent evening on Wednesday, June 25th.

Due to this change, we have pushed back our reporting processes to the end of the term. Reports will go out on Friday, June 27th, and the parent-teacher interviews will be during the first week back in term 3.

Related to the math results, the Ministry of Education has extended its Year 7 and 8 math intervention programme. Tahuna Intermediate took part in the first trial, and we are very lucky to have secured the services of Sarah Bartley, who has been leading the programme for some of our students.

Thank you in advance for finding care for your students on Wednesday. As you know, the school will take its second and final teacher-only day for the year to focus on structured literacy, specifically spelling. The following two days will also differ, as 12 of the 19 teachers will attend the course. By putting so many through the course at once, we hope to create change in our spelling programme quicker and ultimately benefit your child. The remaining seven teachers will go to the course in term 3. There will be no specialist programme, music, math extension or other extracurricular activities on Thursday and Friday of next week as we will be using all other teachers to cover those at the course.

Finally, a huge thank you to all the staff and parents who have attended the Year 8 camps or are about to head out next week with Room 1 and 22. A special thank you to Rob Wells and Kate Walsh for all the organising you have done to prepare and lead the Year 8 camp programme. Camp Columba is a special place with facilities far better than anywhere near Dunedin. We hope your child enjoyed the camp and, more importantly, learned something about themselves.

Kā mihi nui

Simon Clarke

Principal