Summary Highlights 2022

The full Statement of Service Performance can be accessed here. This contains all useful data related to our services

Growth and Sustainability

• 2022 was a year focused on restablishing ourselves as a key, foundation organisation within the broader Networked Education. While the pandemic had renforced the role a networked schools model should play in building reslience into our education system, it has also created an even more financially challenging enrvironment for our schools. As schools recovered from this, so to did their engagement with us. We also refocused much of our energy into engaging with our schools on the key benefits of networked education
• We made a surplus, largely through the continuing agreement with the Ministry of Education and our partners within the Virtual Learning Network. Our engagement with members was also a key part of this. 
• Our size enables depth and breadth in the curriculum we provide. Certainty in curriculum creates sustainable long term membership and possible external revenue streams
• 2022 was also the second year of the Ministry of Education Agreement we held for the Virtual Learning Network Community. This has much needed funds and the potential for the Ministry Of Education to play a key role in supporting networked education in Aotearoa New Zealand. At this point the they have not made any firm commitment on this continuing.

Curriculum

• In 2022 NetNZ offered 68 courses, across 106 schools, with 676 enrolments. The latter was a drop from 758 the previous year. We also piloted Big Science, which had 270 registrations, with extensive interest in the home school community. However, this is funded through Curious Minds and is therefore, free.
• All courses (apart from Big Science) represent 4-6 hours of learning per week and over 132000 hours of additional supplemental education across participating schools. This is significant, especially for small rural schools. Additional programmes have been offered, including Criminal Minds (two classes), Senior Drama, L3 Physics, Classical Studies, Geography and Business Studies, as well as a number of year 5-8 programmes to become available over 2023 and into 2024. The first of which, Asian Language and Culture is now available.
• Some schools and ākonga acces programmes in their modular form. This allows greater flexibility for learners to shift between pathways where necessary and ensures we meet the now varied needs of our schools. Programmes are  available by term, semester or for a full year. These can be viewed on Journey
• The provision of languages remains a key focus for us, largely because many of our schools cannot provide full pathways. We can now ensure pathways in French, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, German, Spanish, and Te Reo Maori. Korean in particular is the only full pathway on offer across New Zealand schools.
• We continue to develop programmes in niche areas that many of our schools are not able to provide internally. These include Psychology, Computer Science and Programming,  Art History, Philosophy, and Senior Social Studies.

Learning and Teaching

• Our schools continue to develop their systems of onsite support for their NetNZ students. 
• NCEA results continue to excel with 84% of achievement standards entered achieved by students, while 60% were achieved at Merit or Excellence level (36%). 
• NetNZ’s educational environment is enabled using a combination of our learning exchange - Journey and the Google Suite. All schools have a dashboard on Journey that centralises key course and school administration. At the moment, NZQA and attendance records are held using Google Sheets, which essentially acts as a lightweight SMS. All learning, communication and collaboration is largely enabled using a combination of Google Spaces, Google Docs and Google Meet (for synchronous). At a learning level we have deliberately encouraged teachers towards the use of ‘connected’ environments that reflect how the modern world works and align with our pedagogical principles. 
• We have a central articulation of our pedagogical approach, now published as Towards Networked Learning.pdf. This has been used with teachers across both networks and shared with the education community more widely. It lays the foundation for further unpacking, development of case studies and aligned pedagogical framework.  We have ran numerous professional learning opportunities based around the key values and principles that have emerged from Towards Networked Learning. These included topics such as Emergent Design, the role of online learning environments in enabling our principles, Supporting the learner, Virtual Cafes for more informal discussion,to name just a few.
• Networked learning is fundamentally different from their normal experience of classroom-based teaching/learning. The support and advisory work we do alongside our online teachers, eDeans, principals and other school staff, facilitates the growth of personal and system-wide understanding and practice of networked learning. 
• All providing schools now have a Memorandum of Agreement with NetNZ that includes recognition of the networked environment in a teacher's professional growth cycle.
• We developed the first draft of a pedaogogical framework that will act as a reference point for teacher practice
• We held our networked hui in Christchurch and Dunedin in November. As usual this was an invaluable exercise in bringing everyone together (despite obvious challenges). We greatly appreciate the support of all our schools in enabling this event.