On behalf of the staff and students at Oaklands School I would like to thank all our parent community for their support and help during 2017.

We are fortunate to have a committed Board of Trustees who support our classroom programmes by funding equipment, personnel, resources and professional development. The school is also supported by an enthusiastic and active PTA, who during the year have organised school activities, our Gala and fundraising programmes.   

During 2017 we have begun to implement our Education Plan and our Cultural Narrative. We introduced learning hubs to provide a model for collaborative teaching and learning as part of our development of our innovative learning spaces. Our hubs implemented whanau hui’s as part of the morning programme to support our community value. Students were taught songs and discussed their focus for the week. Each hub developed a hub blog to communicate weekly with our families. The blogs have provided general information as well as samples of student learning and classroom programmes. In term 1 and term 2 we provided hub meetings for our parents to share our collaborative programmes.

We have continued our PB4L (Positive Behaviour for Learning) programmes to support our values programme. This has provided school wide training for our staff to further develop our wellbeing programmes. We also implemented the KiVa Anti-Bullying programme. Each week our students have either a Values lesson or KiVa lesson to learn strategies for student well-being.

We have completed our Master Build initial planning to develop plans for our renovations. The initial stage has been approved by the Ministry of Education. The next step is to begin the detailed planning at the beginning of 2018.

There have been many highlights and achievements during 2017. Our students have had many personal achievements with academic, sporting and cultural successes both personally and locally against other schools. These successes have been made possible by the dedication and commitment of our talented staff. Camps have continued to be a highlight for many classes and education outside the classroom is an important aspect of our learning programmes.

On behalf of the staff we would like to wish everyone a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year and have a safe holiday.

Best wishes

Margaret Trotter

Principal