Like most things, Covid19 and lockdown has had an impact on the way Māpua School has shared information about your child’s progress and achievement with you this year. We have been reconsidering the best way to do this for the remainder of 2020 and beyond.

Staff have been working for more than a year on an improved system for sharing information with you. Feedback we received on our old reporting system was that timing wasn’t great - the usefulness of an end of year summary was questioned by many and the option of being able to access information about children’s progress in an ongoing manner would be preferable.

The system we have elected to develop our use of is called “Spotlight” and is an integrated part of our current student data management system (ETap) used for storing information. The process to set this up has been lengthy (and to be honest somewhat painful at points!) but we are now using it in classes as an integral part of the learning conversations happening in our programmes. This information will be used to generate a written report for each child, excluding our New Entrant students who will use a more narrative style of reporting. This report will be shared with you in Week Three of Term Four and be followed by an interview.

At this interview, you will be introduced to the parent view of Spotlight. In this view you will be able to see recent achievements in reading, writing, maths and key competencies (other areas of the curriculum are being added over time) as well as the learning outcomes your child is focussing on at the moment. Following this, we will be asking for parent volunteers who would like to be involved in the trial group for the Spotlight App going live. With the live app, you will be able to log in at any time and check in, discuss and celebrate your child’s learning.

In 2021 we aim to have the app live for all whānau to access. At this point, written reports will be replaced by an ongoing conversation - you will have access to the learning conversation and ongoing assessment and progress of your child. There will still be the opportunities for interviews/conferences twice a year. These interviews will form an important part of the conversation.

You will notice a change in the language used with this style of reporting. The comments you read, for the most part, will be directed at the student and guiding their learning. There may also be comments directed to you as whānau about your child, but this will not be the main focus. You are being given a window into the learning conversations and progress being made by your child, rather than being written to about this.