Our Key Approaches

We have some underlying key approaches underpinning our collaborative Achievement Challenge and targets.  It is our intention that these concepts will be evident in the work carried out across our Achievement Challenge and will lead to us meeting our identified targets.

• External Influences: We will seek to understand how these influences may impact our students and our practices.  By ensuring that our practice is responsive to need we are considering the things outside of our control but ensuring that they are taken into account.

• Educationally Powerful Connections & Whānau Engagement: creating educationally powerful connections and partnerships with whānau and community is essential to strengthening engagement and effective practice. “Educationally powerful connections and relationships between teachers, leaders, parents and whānau are components of an effective response to underachievement” (ERO, 2015, p. 43). Our schools will involve whānau voice in our initial data gathering stages as well as ongoing collaboration, consultation and updates to ensure that the community is engaging in a genuine and effective partnership.

• Transitions: we will examine how we can make pivotal transition times smoother for students and their whānau, how we can share information across schools to make transitions more successful, how we can make our assessment data reliable by sharing understandings of expectations across schools and how we can use student and parent voice to help improve our practice within this area.

• Partnerships: once key staff are appointed and roles are decided we intend to deepen existing relationships with Rangitāne iwi to creating educationally powerful, sustainable connections. Rangitāne iwi already work with some of our schools and we anticipate that greater iwi input will further enhance our Achievement Challenge. We will also explore, strengthen and prioritise connections with Early Childhood Educators (ECEs) and Tertiary Providers.  

• Working Under an Inquiry Mindset: by using Teaching as Inquiry as a primary vehicle to improve to teacher capability we anticipate that teachers will identify when their practice is  or is not optimising students’ learning opportunities, an important contextual condition identified in the Best Evidence Synthesis (Teacher Professional Learning and Development, 2007).