Kia ora koutou

I hope you are enjoying the lovely bit of sunshine and warmth we are having this week. Thanks to those of you who have responded to the couple of articles I have put out this week – about the strike and about the traffic situation. I hope that we can be a community that acts respectfully and with care for each other at pick up and drop off time (actually, at all times). I worry about what a small number of parents are modelling for their children when they knowingly flout the safety traffic rules or behave impatiently and, at times, even aggressively in the carpark in front of their children. 

For our new build education brief, I have been writing about the characteristics of our community and one of the things I have mentioned is that people come to live here because it is a safe community. Ensuring that Churton Park remains a safe community as it grows is something that we all need to take responsibility for – including at 3pm in and around the school carpark. We all need to hold each other accountable for the behaviour of community members – in a respectful and polite way.

Thanks to people for their expressions of support with regards to the strike. While teachers are very concerned about impacts of this action on students and parents, we are looking at the long game, and in the end we believe that this (ongoing) action will not only benefit teachers, it will benefit students and, therefore, parents. Education has been depleted over many years through the raft of policies that have governed education and the actions (or lack of actions) of successive governments, at the expense of teachers and students. It is time to put this right. However, I also want to say that at Amesbury School, we are very aware that there are responsibilities on the teaching profession to solve some of the problems we are experiencing by thinking outside the square and thinking of new and smarter ways to “do” education better, rather than continuing to look at education through the same old lenses. We (at Amesbury School) are not fighting to simply maintain the status quo – we are also exploring how we move education into the new postmodern era and how we can be smarter in our delivery of education – to solve some of the issues ourselves. However, it is difficult to do this when teachers are overworked – a conundrum that we are trying to resolve.

Finally, towards the end of last year and early this year, we consulted with the community through several focus groups, a community evening and an online survey, asking the question: “What 3 – 5 outcomes of an Amesbury education would you want for your children?” The purpose of this was to develop a “graduate profile” which describes what our school community wants for its children. As a result of some further work we have been doing (including putting together the Education Brief for the New Build, and ongoing consultation), I have returned to that graduate profile and put a few more words around it. The outcomes from the consultation have been formulated into six main characteristics. I would be interested to have any further thoughts from you about whether there is anything significant missing from the following profile:

Amesbury School Graduate Profile

• Future-focused academic capability – having the skills, capacities, knowledge and qualifications so that students are not disabled/disqualified from participating in the world in any way they might want – now and in the future.

• Learner capabilities – learner agency and insiderness, a continuous learner who can learn, unlearn and relearn.

• Confidence – able to stand and act confidently in the world, with a developing knowledge of who they are and where they stand on issues.

• Contribution – understands that each individual has a unique and valuable contribution to make in/to the world; realises that the world will be worse off without each person’s contribution, and, as a result, feels a moral responsibility to make his/her contribution.

• Ability to collaborate and work effectively in teams with diverse others – understands the interdependent nature of the world - their need of others and others’ need of them. Values diversity and multiple perspectives. Listens, asks questions. Seeks to understand more than to be understood.

• Maintaining a positive outlook, health and well-being – having the skills, knowledge, capacities (self-control, self-awareness, resilience, for example) and strategies to maintain a healthy lifestyle and a positive outlook and to re-establish it when it is lost for a time. Understands the need to continually pay attention to this.

Enjoy the rest of the week.

Ka kite ano

Lesley