Tēnā koutou katoa

Can we talk about attendance?

There has been much coverage in recent times regarding school attendance in the media and rightly so given the current rather dismal picture across New Zealand. Historically we have concentrated all our national resourcing and effort on a very small number of serious truants however, this has led to a situation whereby our overall trend as a country for all students has dropped as we have not been focusing on setting those high standards across the board.

Any student hitting the low threshold of 80% has often been overlooked in the truancy picture. COVID has not helped the situation with us all encouraged to stay home when sick however, we do need to move on and, as a community, we do need to raise the bar.

The Ministry of Education has now set a benchmark with a clear definition that “regular attendance” means being at school more than 90% of the time. This has caused many schools, including our own, to reflect on our attendance data and look at it in a different way.

We still need to focus on those students who are chronically absent of course but also need to ask why a child is at 85% instead of over the benchmark of 90! A child sitting on 80% is away one day a week and in their two-year journey here at Heaton missing over a term and a half of learning.

If I look at OUR data for last term our overall attendance rate of 92% looks pretty good and something to be celebrated as being way above the national norm. However, when I look at the MOE report for term 4 2022 with the lens of identifying any student under 90%, the picture is far less appealing with under 60% of our student population hitting this milestone. Essentially we have a lot of students attending in the 80%-90% range.

Post COVID we need to reset our standards and our expectations around attendance. If your child is genuinely sick then of course keep them home however, at all other times we need to see them here at school and ready for learning. Reports are coming home soon. I ask please that you take note of your child’s attendance percentage and measure it against that 90% minimum and then take any necessary action to ensure your child can be at school.

Property Update

• The playground has taken longer than expected due to the very poor weather and the impact this has had on completing the drainage side of things. We are hoping this will be resolved quickly in time for the winter term.

• The new class block of 9 rooms is well underway with foundation work on track.

• Work on the hardcourts is steaming along and still on track for a July finish, just in time for the next phase of demolition where we remove the Science/Food and two classrooms.

• We are expecting two portable classrooms dropped in the very near future to accommodate us in the short term.

Winter Sport

Huge thanks to all those involved in our winter sport programme and to our volunteer coaches across all disciplines. Our kura continues to send the maximum amount of teams to winter sports with over 330 students heading out of our gates each Tuesday afternoon and Mrs Henderson is doing an incredible job pulling this logistical puzzle together supported by our staff team here.

Kapa Haka and School Production

It was wonderful to see over 200 guests come for our kapa haka showcase. Whaea Chrissy and the team have become victims of their own success as we now find ourselves short on uniforms with well over 100 participants in our kapa haka group. These are good problems to have allowing us to consider options for a new kapa haka uniform for 2024 that is more reflective of our gifted name and cultural narrative. If there is any local business that would like to sponsor such an endeavour and would like to talk this through, please contact me directly.

Ngā mihi nui

James Griggs, Tumuaki/Principal