One of the fundamental organisational mechanisms in a secondary school is its timetable. We use a timetable to structure the school day and week, to organise curriculum in a logical and balanced way, to schedule teaching and learning time fairly and predictably, to allocate specialist teaching space, and more. A well-organised timetable is the stage on which amazing things can happen in a school.

Organising a timetable is complex work. For the last three terms, Hornby High School staff have been discussing and thinking hard about our school timetable, and how we might redesign it to better meet the needs and priorities of our kura. We have been inspired by a recently published piece of New Zealand research called It’s Time: transformational timetabling practices; but we have also discussed in-depth what the timetable priorities are for our school and our learners, with an eye towards changing our school timetable in 2023.

We settled on four broad priorities for our timetable work:

Priority

Committing timetable time for Wānanga for the whole school (Years 7 - 13), and reviewing the allocation of Wānanga time.

Why?

Wānanga is valuable time dedicated to fostering quality relationships for learning, which is important for all our learners.

We need to ensure Wānanga time is balanced with other curriculum needs

Priority

Ensuring more stability and predictability for our Year 7&8 groupings

Why?

Year 7&8 students and teachers have not been as well served by our current timetable structures, in terms of stability of staffing, and allocation of specialist resources.

Priority

Exploring longer periods of learning, or a mixture of shorter and longer periods.

Why?

This allows time and space for creativity, practical work and deeper learning. It also means young people potentially have fewer class change-overs and movements in a day.

Priority

Creating a structure that allows ākonga more choice and agency over their learning programme, but also ensures the basics are covered.

Why?

If a young person has more choice and ownership over what and how they learn, they are more likely to be engaged. But it is also important that young person is guided towards a broad and balanced curriculum experience.

The details of exactly how this will look in 2023 are still being worked on and finalised, but a ‘sneak peak’ of the main changes is as follows:

• Classes will be timetabled on a mixture of 50 minute and 100 minute blocks of time. Each course of learning a young person does will be timetabled for some short (50 minute) and some long (100 minute) blocks of time.

• All learners will be part of a Wānanga grouping, and the divisions of Wānanga groupings will change from what they are currently. Year 7&8s will have 250 minutes of Wānanga per week; Year 9&10 200 minutes per week; and Years 11 - 13 100 minutes per week.

• Senior students (Years 11-13) will have the opportunity to study five full courses; and the ability to select an additional ‘half’ course or ‘mini’ course that allows for more creativity and variety in their course of study.

• Junior students in Year 7 - 10 will have increased opportunity to choose their courses and the contexts through which they learn, whilst ensuring balanced curriculum coverage, and appropriate attention to literacy and numeracy.

• We will use a new programme called SchoolPoint to facilitate course selection. We anticipate that this will make course selection a much easier and more transparent process for ākonga and whānau.

• The length of the school day, and allocation of kai time, will remain the same.

The next step in the process is to begin course selection for 2023’s Year 11 - 13 students, followed closely by junior course selection. Watch out for more communication and instructions on course selection in the coming weeks.

We look forward to communicating more of this with the young people and our community as we speed towards 2023!