Here at Tauranga Girls' College, we have been on a 36-month journey to rebuild, reset and refresh PB4L: Positive Behaviour for Learning. This means we provide a positive school climate that supports personal, social and academic growth for students and staff.

The Ministry of Education asked us to present to central North Island schools on our mahi in this area. Liv Marshall, Maia Kahura, Honey Cooney, Cerys Adkins and Charlotte Wilde accompanied Mrs Finnimore to present and were outstanding. Indeed, Ministry lead Andrew Sutherland wrote to Tara Kanji, stating, “How impressive Jane and the students were in their presentation today at our PB4L cluster conference. It is a special thing to see the engagement of the students in the programme and seeing them step up as leaders. It adds a lot of meaning for the audience to have the student voice represented to show the programme's impact. You have some real champions for positive school culture there. Thank you for supporting PB4L in your kura.”

Our kura is now considered a lead school for the teaching, implementation and systems we have developed, and we are very proud of this. Indeed we have presented twice in the central North Island and once at the National Conference in Wellington.

So what is it, and what do we do? Well, PB4L begins with our values and supports the school foci of building whanaungatanga; student engagement and achievement. To do this, we teach and build expectations, strengthen consistency, provide routines and explicitly and positively teach the behaviours we want to see and why. We teach this through our weekly slides, and all teaching is centred around our core values of mahi tahi, manaakitanga and mana motuhake.

This journey has involved reframing our schoolwide values using a Te Ao Māori lens. This allowed us to broaden our values as meaningful conceptual understandings which are seamlessly embedded into our kura. From these foundations, we have grown a kura-wide PB4L system that includes weekly PB4L teachings, responsive data-driven themes that draw on ākonga and kaiako voice, and a shared understanding of new behaviour frameworks and our values in action.

A big thank you to our students and staff for supporting this mahi. You are the reason this programme flourishes.