NGATEA PRIMARY SCHOOL: SHIFTING FROM A TRAUMA AWARE TO TRAUMA HEALING SCHOOL

Ngatea Primary School is well on its journey to becoming a “trauma informed school”. It’s a journey that started last year when it simply became too difficult to get professional support for many of our students from outside agencies. In many cases when calling out for help, the door is either shut, or we are placed on 6 weeks (or longer) waiting lists. And the need within our school keeps growing. Teachers are coming out of classrooms more and more  to support students who are facing their own personal challenges - and the flow-on effect of this is that we are taking away the teaching time from the other students.

Therefore, if the system can’t support the school and our students, then we need to change the system. And we are doing this from the bottom up.

While we are not being funded by the MOE to support these growing needs, nor are our staff trained psychologists or counsellors, we have now arrived at a crisis point where something needs to change for all our students at Ngatea Primary School. It also means that we need to review the way we resource our school (including our staffing) and teaching and learning programmes.

What have we been doing to date?

• Wellbeing is one of the Board's strategic goals for 2022-2024, and the spotlight will stay on it over the next few years.

• Collaborating with Kerepēhi School to ensure that we have a multicultural perspective across our decisions and initiatives.

• Set up and resourced Te Punanga (A place of safety and refuge. Our space of calmness, a space to be happy, a space to heal)

• Online meetings with a Geelong Grammar School in Victoria, Australia, who has already been down this pathway. The state of Victoria is streaks ahead of New Zealand in addressing wellbeing in schools.

• Building our understanding of trauma, and the impact trauma has on people through readings, online tutorials, and meeting with experts in this field, such as Nathan Wallis (a neuroscience educator and parenting commentator).

• Visited a school in Napier to see some trauma informed initiatives in practice.

• Identified the many, many initiatives we are already doing that promotes wellbeing for all our students, and supports students that are facing personal challenges.

• Developed a work plan that identifies new initiatives and builds our capacity to become a trauma healing school.

• Utilising our current staffing creatively for us to have a “Wellbeing teacher” and a learning support staff member to support wellbeing and trauma. The hours allocated to this is very limited, but a good start towards the right direction.

• The Board has set aside a further $20,000 above its $10,000 budget to resource and staffing some of the initiatives already in place, and new ones.

Where to next?

We still have a long way to go as we build our capacity to respond to the wide range of ways trauma impacts on the lives of children.

• We have no intention of becoming counsellors as our primary job is teaching. But we will continue to up-skill ourselves to ensure that we are able to cater for the wide range of needs that enter our school every day.

• Working through our work plan piece by piece as we can't do everything at once.

• We hear the voices of whanau who are also crying out for help - and therefore we are investigating how to resource a therapist to support both students and whanau.

• Continue to build on our school culture (the way of being and doing) as we shift from being trauma aware to trauma healing.

Any support and advice in anything that jumps out in this article will be much appreciated - please call the school office (07 8677305) or e-mail me at principal@ngatea.school.nz.

Ngā mihi nui

Neil