Amesbury Digest - 1st August 2022

Kia ora tātou,

It has been a busy week back at school and a positive start to Term 3. It has been wonderful to see ākonga back with us again, and we also welcome our new families who have joined us this term.

I would like to give a brief update on that ever present topic these days - Covid in our community. We have had a spate of cases amongst our staff over the past couple of weeks, although this does not appear to be through spread of the virus at school. We currently have four staff members away with Covid, with two staff members having recovered and returned to school through the week. All staff members are doing well, all things considered, and are experiencing mild to moderate symptoms. It has been a bit of a juggle to keep everything running smoothly with the recent uptick in staff absences, so huge thanks goes out to all staff members for your mahi and support in ensuring the school is clean and safe, and that the learning and wellbeing needs of all ākonga are being met.

We do not currently have the same rate of Covid amongst our ākonga, thankfully. We currently have no active cases of Covid in Koru Hub; we have two current cases of Covid in Harakeke Hub, and three cases in Pōhutukawa. As there are some current cases in our school community, we ask that families remain vigilant for signs of sickness, and keep tamariki away from school and test them if they are unwell. Please let us know if your child or any household contacts test positive for Covid, as this helps us to monitor the rate of cases and potential spread at school. Mask wearing amongst staff and year 4-6 ākonga is high, and we are very pleased with the response to our request for mask wearing indoors. Thank you all for your ongoing support with this.

Learning update

As part of this digest we have included a summary of our mid year ākonga achievement data. It is a high level summary of achievement, as we do not wish to publish more detailed data where individuals or groups of tamariki could be easily identified. Our data is looking pleasing, with an overall decrease in the proportion of students working below standard. We are also showing an increase in the proportion of students working above standard in some areas, and we will continue to work on increasing this across other areas of learning.

As a school, we have a Design of Learning (DoL) team that works together to plan high level learning programmes that integrate learning with each inquiry. Demelza is our DoL lead teacher, and there are kaiako (teachers) from each hub in the team who lead this mahi (Jemima, Sonali, Onaitta, and Angela). This helps to ensure our learning programmes are rich, purposeful, and integrated, meaning they link together as much as possible. Teams then use the high level plan from the DoL team to personalise it for their particular ākonga and the needs they have identified from the data. This all leads to learning programmes that are very well thought through and purposeful, and have the needs of the students at the very centre.

Teams spend time on our teacher planning days during each holiday delving deeply into the achievement data to identify group and individual needs for students, and to plan learning programmes to meet these needs. This term each hub has a particular team focus around writing where they are exploring the most effective and impactful ways for learning to happen in this area. All kaiako are very focused on ensuring the very best outcomes for all ākonga, and we will report on our student achievement data again at the end of the year.

Please check out the student achievement article in this digest for information on our mid year data.

Kia haumaru te noho - stay safe and well.

Ngā mihi nui,

Urs Cunningham