BOARD’S STRATEGIC STATEMENT 2009
The Board of Trustees, in reflecting its parent body’s wishes and their expectations for their children, is committed to supporting its staff in ensuring that all our children are content and settled at school. Our children should have opportunities to enjoy success in their learning and should be helped to develop understandings about what it means to be successful in the contexts of what they are doing. The Board believes that all our children should develop as capable readers and writers; they should become competent in their language by being able to express themselves, write sensibly and purposefully, and become confident and find enjoyment in reading; the children should know how to spell appropriately and write legibly; the children should be well grounded in maths and be able to do their maths effectively; the children should have reasonable levels of physical skills, fitness, co-ordination and should be provided with opportunities to participate with enjoyment in areas of physical, health and outdoor education and sport. The Board is committed to ensuring our children develop a strong sense of personal wellbeing, resourcefulness and confidence in their own ability to succeed while at Morrinsville Primary and be well prepared to meet the challenges in their future schooling. The Board views it as important, that our children develop positive social attitudes towards others and towards their environment.
The Board continues to see as its governance focus, to provide support in creating the environments and conditions which will encourage and assist its staff work with the children to achieve these goals. The Board reaffirms the key sentiments of its Mission Statement which reflects the Board’s attitude in delivering the curriculum across its school community.
The Board will focus its attention on developing the key elements which it deems necessary to achieve these outcomes during the current year, as outlined in its development plans, budget statements and organisational schedule.
Brett Johnstone
Chairman
Our 2009 school year’s programmes will continue its major focus on children’s literacy. Our intention is to build on key aspects of the MoE LPDP Yr 1 programme which worked around moderating and analysing data based on children’s writing. This year the focus will be on how this analysis impacts on learning programmes, teacher pedagogy and practice in meeting children’s literacy learning needs. A critical aspect of our focus will be on improving teacher practice while applying their content knowledge and analysis of needs in setting goals for writing. As part of this programme the leadership team will develop strategies and approaches to guiding and supporting teachers in achieving these outcomes through classroom visits, planning observations and specific feedback.
There will be an ongoing focus on DATS, building vocabulary, comprehension in usage, sentence comprehension (particularly in the middle area of the school) and paragraph comprehension in senior (Yr 5/Yr 6) classes. Key strategies for developing writing will be based around developing deeper features in children’s writing and the use of various figures of speech and progressions in language writings. Again there will be a focus on identifying weaknesses in sentence structures, paragraph construction and vocabulary content. Staff will be resourced through participation in LPDP programmes and attendance at Gaye Byers courses. Teachers are agreed on improving children’s spelling and understanding of words as part of strategy to improve both reading and writing.
The tools we will use as part of this assessment practice will be STAR and AsTTle and PM Benchmarkers (Revised Editions). In addition PAT Vocabulary and PAT Comprehension (mid year) will be used in some areas of the school. Senior classes may use Probe to assist in building up a reasonable profile of children’s capabilities and determining short term instructional goals. Reading Running Records will be used in the J1-Y3 to monitor progress and identify critical learning needs.
There are specific targets set, based around the 2008 outcomes and information collated from assessments in March 2009 (Ref attached Targets 2009).
These assessment profiles show a low level of language development in some new entrants and current Year 1 children, with many below or at the 1.1 level in writing.
The evidence available in March/April (Ref Rdg Wedge Graph) indicates that the Y0 (NE) group is below the National pattern at entry. There are a few making tentative progress at that point. There is no pre-reading knowledge evidence in a number of these children. This shows up in the suppressed early reading level. We will attach extra part time teacher support for language periods over Terms 2 and 3. This coupled with a highly experienced teacher team should see this group making progress. There are also an identified group of Year 2 children and a group of Year 1s whose reading performance is a concern at this point. (Ref Wedge graph). The placement of targeted additional teacher support (7.5-8 hours per week) for Term 2 and Term 3 is aimed at aligning this group close to the National Patterns for Literacy. Junior classes will monitor and track individual progress over the period in order to ensure progress is maintained.
The major language deficiencies in basic word recognition, limited vocabulary range and low early reading levels impact strongly on the Year 1-2 profiles. The poor functional oral language impacts significantly on the children’s reading and writing in their first year at school. Strategically, teachers will build up word banks, set up strong relevant child focused learning experiences which contextually focus their reading and writing. It is expected that through this approach teachers in both the Year 1 and 2 classes will gear children towards acquiring basic oral language skills, alphabet knowledge, sight word recognition, letter sound recognition along the language progressions outlined in the Curriculum Progression Document. The Board will resource this teaching and learning focus in years 1-2 through senior management support and the provision of additional teacher time to achieve targets identified by senior staff.
The Literacy Yr 3 to Yr 6 2008 results have shown significant gains made as a result of the 2008 projects. It is intended to continue along similar lines this year.
We have identified key target cohorts where literacy gains can be achieved. We have also key sub groups within year cohorts which will be the focus of DATS to raise attainment levels. For specific details refer to Target 2009 section of this Strategic Plan and teachers Literacy focus groups.
The levels of children’s attainment in numeracy for 2008 indicated significant gains in the ANP Level 7/8. The target MB and MG achieved exceptionally well. Specific details are outlined in the Analysis for Variance document : 2008 year, the March ANP/ENP assessment profiles. There are a significant group of children in Year 4 at Level 3 and Year 3 at Level 2 who can be advanced to the next level. Generally the numeracy profiles are positive with large cohorts at or above Level 4. This offers us opportunities to build on their abilities in advanced counting to ensure Yr 5 are strong in Advanced Additive Part-Whole thinking. The target for pedagogical practice for the Year 6s is to support the lower achievers at Level 4 (8 children) and focus on the Level 5 (26 children) to achieve Advanced Multiplication Part Whole. The more advanced Yr 6s will be challenged to work in developing proportional thinking strategies and complete problem solving at this level. We need to ensure that the students working at Level 6-8 continue to be challenged to achieve at Level 8 by the end of the year.
While the school aims to strengthen the children’s achievement in their academic pursuits, the staff are also committed to maintaining a strong PE fitness and Health Programme for children. We plan to seek out further initiatives to improve on gains made this year, e.g. ‘Healthy Eating and Exercise’ being one area of focus to continue momentum. We will continue with our programme of physical competencies development. We intend to put more emphasis on our school FAST (Fitness, Agility, Skills in a Team environment). The skills focus and the coaching and training programmes have proved their worth and we aim to keep this as a priority across school practice. We need to further refine our Healthy Eating programme. The Breakfast Club initiative has been introduced from Term 1 2009 and the Canteen menu has been updated. Further work is needed here. We will explore other avenues for this over the year, e.g. Waikato Energize Project.
Our camps and other education beyond the school programmes will continue. The board’s ongoing support ensures that most of our traditional programmes will run again this year (Ref Annual Report : Statement of Objectives and Service Performance).
We will support high academic and sporting achievers through extension and specialized programmes. We will provide additional programmes and extension and learning activities in Maths, Science, English, Music, PE and Kapahaka. Our assessment programmes will assist in identifying these children’s needs across these curricula.
The community involvement in our school life is very high, featuring around children’s activities while at school, e.g. camps, trips, excursions, team sport, tournaments and bush walks. The Board’s representative involvement has been very successful in 2008. We will continue to work along these lines for 2009.
The Board’s goal of ensuring children have opportunities to experience learning beyond the classroom will be achieved through camps and learning activities such as pond study, bush walks, kayaking etc. We will continue to promote these aspects of our charter intent with sufficient resource allocations and personnel to maximise both children and family involvement.
Families have indicated high levels of satisfaction with the school’s inter relationships. We will continue to actively promote consultation and open dialogue to access opinion and feedback from our families relative to our school activities, and interests. The intention is to maintain conversations at the practical and informal level, pursuing networking and a commitment to building and maintaining relationships.
We found the strategies used for building the ‘family feel’ about the school based on fairness, respect, sense of belonging and active listening and consideration are working well. The increased interaction, improved reporting, information sharing, and relationships building at class level effectively contributes to building this rapport.
Conclusion
The majority of parents provide us with feedback which indicates that they want to be involved and participate with the school in their children’s learning. The attitude is a supportive and well meaning one. The families indicate that there is a high expectation by them for their children to be “well taught” and the general view is that they perceive that “their child’s teacher” ought to achieve this for them. We will continue to focus attention on managing this relationship by providing opportunities for parent teacher interaction and inter-relating, and in providing a strong teacher professional development attitude in the school. The staff culture is one of collegiality and commitment to supporting one another in creating a school where everyone feels comfortable to be part of. This is manifested in action as we work as a team in meaningful, genuine and sincere ways.
Shay Noonan
Principal