Friday 8 February

Dear Parents / Caregivers

Kia ora koutou

Reminder about the following:

Tuesday 12 February

• YR7/8 Parents: 5.10-5.30 - Opportunity for parents to come to Hub 2 and ask any questions about the 2019 Senior learning year ie; Hilary awards, technology etc.

• School Picnic: 5.30 - 6.30 pm - Whole School

• Lucy Hone: 7 - 8 pm ( School Hall ) Resilience - How can we build it in ourselves and others?

School Picnic

On this day you are invited to bring your family and a picnic tea to school out on the back field as a way of getting to know each other in a relaxed setting. A number of teams did this last year and it was very successful. We would like to try this as a whole school this year.

We will have some informal games/ activities available for the children.

Lucy Hone - Building Resilience

Many of you will know that Lucy is a world-renowned researcher and speaker on building resilience. She is an excellent and inspirational speaker and she will provide lots of practical ideas and ways to build resilience in our children and in ourselves. We are very lucky to have her at our school and we look forward to having a parent representative from every family. This session will be pitched at parents. This is a must attend! Lucy will also be speaking to the staff after school on this day.

We look forward to seeing you at the above events on this day.

Old Hall Carpark

Do we have a group of parents / helpers in our community that could give some time to clean up the Old Hall carpark. This is a City Council carpark and we have made requests for a clean up with little help coming. Sadly this area has become a dumping ground for rubbish and a hanging out area for local youth for late night drinking as the bottles and cans testify. This area is not a good look for us next door to our school. Please contact the office if you can help.

In Zone / Out of Zone enrolments

For some time now the Board of Trustees have been reviewing our enrolment scheme and zone and monitoring closely the numbers of students attending Queenspark School. Late last year Dean Taylor ( Board Chairman ) and myself visited the Ministry of Education to discuss our enrolment scheme and the issues related to in zone and out of zone enrolments.  We were given a very a clear message that the Ministry policy is for children to attend their local school and for schools to accept only in zone enrolments. They also reminded us that out of zone enrolments do not generate funding for schools for property and additional classroom purposes. The way this works is that if a school applies to the MOE for additional classroom space the MOE look at the total roll and subtract the out of zone students and look at the remaining in zone students in terms of whether the school has adequate accommodation to meet these numbers.

For some years our Boards policy has been to accept out of zone sibling children where the first child has been enrolled in zone. (ie. families who have started 'in zone' and then moved 'out of zone') What has become clear is that the Ministry of Education believe that we can no longer sustain this policy and they are requiring us to “manage down” our out of zone students.

The Board is currently reviewing this part of the schools enrolment policy at present and will need to consider the current position and advice that the MOE has given us.  The Board intend to have this review completed shortly and will notify the QPS community of any changes ASAP.

Yr 5 - 8 Aquatics Programme 2019

This year we plan to trial a change to our traditional Yr 5 - 8 Swimming Sports as follows:

1. Zone Sports trial ( two lengths minimum ) to select our zone team.

2. Aquatics skills carnival (focusing on developing swimmers) later in the year designed to celebrate the progress the children have made in their respective team aquatics programme.

The reasons for this proposed change are as follows:

• To cater for individual differences in a more effective way. (one size does not fit all)

• To better meet the needs of our developing swimmers and to extend our “ swimming confident “ children.

(Over the years we have noticed that swimming skills have dropped markedly and that an increasing number of children are reluctant to take part due to a lack of aquatic skills and water confidence, body image issues and related anxiety. How fair is it to ask these children to race publicly and risk a further loss in confidence? Swimming racing is the traditional sports approach but there are other ways to celebrate and share aquatic skills for developing swimmers. School swimming programmes are not about developing competitive swimmers but are about teaching students how to be confident in and around water. The NZ Curriculum emphasises aquatic skills not competitive swimming skills. The curriculum asks that students have the opportunity to learn basic survival skills should they fall into water or find themselves struggling whilst in water. In recent years we have had to rescue a growing number of swimmers on this day who do not have the swimming skills to compete safely! There is a safety issue here.)

• Our student numbers have increased to a critical level which does not allow for a quality swimming sports day as in the traditional model which primary schools have employed for many years. (The existing format was becoming too unwieldy and we have struggled to firstly get through the programme and secondly to find a pool big enough to cater for our numbers. Our student numbers have increased to a critical level which does not allow for a quality swimming sports day as in the traditional model which primary schools have employed for many years.

Kind Regards

QPS Sports team

Have a great weekend everyone.

Ross Willocks

Principal