We are thrilled to be continuing our journey with PB4L in 2022. PB4L will play a major part in unpacking our new school vision “Learning to Thrive” and values to ensure they are a strong part of what we do on a daily basis at Halswell School.

What is PB4L?

​Positive Behaviour for Learning is an initiative from the Ministry of Education. It aims to provide a positive school climate and to create a supportive environment for personal, social and academic growth for students and staff. Click here for a great website where you can find out lots of information about PB4L.

PB4L will support our new school values through:

Halswell School Behaviour Matrix

The introduction of our Halswell School PB4L Behaviour Matrix will ensure a shared language and understanding of our values by staff, students and whānau.

A big part of PB4L is explicitly teaching students what our values look like and sound like in different settings across the school. This term we will focus on explicitly teaching the “all settings” column and then over 2022 develop the rest of the matrix.

We are keen to get some whānau feedback on the matrix in Term 1 so please contact Cathie Zelas (cathie.zelas@halswell.school.nz) or Kelsey Bush (kelsey.bush@halswell.school.nz) if you would like to be part of a focus group looking at this.

Acknowledgment System

We are introducing a new school-wide system to acknowledge students who are modelling our new values in the playground. This will be based on a relaunch of our school house (whānau) system.

Our traditional house system has not been a huge focus in recent years but with some amendments and rebranding, we think that they will be an excellent vehicle to promote our new school-wide acknowledgement initiative. We have historically had four houses named after former principals. After much consideration, we feel that the existing house names do not have a great deal of relevance for our current students. With this in mind, we plan to initially relaunch the house system as “Whānau” using the four Māori colours Whero, Kōwhai, Kakariki and Kahurangi.

A winning whānau will be announced at each assembly and we have also revamped our assembly certificates to reflect our new values.