In my previous newsletter comment, I referred to the Pastoral Care Team at Villa Maria College. Allow me to introduce all the wonderful people who, along with the subject teachers and support staff, form the core team providing support, guidance, many gentle nudges, pearls of wisdom and listening ears to your young people. We have six Heads of House overseeing roughly 140 students each from Years 7-13: Brodie House-Simone Greenwood, Claver House-Jo Rasmussen, Ennis House-Sarah Perkins, Grace House-Justyna Granicka, McAuley House-Raijieli Wilson and Mercy House-Kate Lundy.

Tēnā koutou

Hopefully, after reading this introduction, you would have worked out that this extract is from the newsletter at the end of term 2, and there is actually a very good reason for the repetition! The pastoral care provision for our Year 7-8 students, while it still comes under the above umbrella, is unique and different enough to warrant further explanation.

Our Year 7-8 teaching team has the privilege of supporting your children through homeroom teaching, seeing them working in a variety of subjects across the day and, therefore, have enormous understanding of whether they are struggling, whether they need extension and what supports they may need. We would encourage parents to communicate any concerns to the homeroom teachers as a first point of contact by email. Susan Arscott is the Team leader and works with Tracey Cringle, Beth Watson and Paula Brown, and their email addresses are on the school website. A more caring and hard-working team would be hard to find.

However, there are pastoral concerns that frequently involve the Heads of House, counsellors and senior leaders together, as collaborative solutions across classes are sometimes required. We are a restorative school and restorative conferences between individuals, groups and at times, whole classes, are initiated to address concerns. Our greatest challenge currently is social media and cell phone abuse. Alarmingly, when I took a session of the dangers of social media with all Year 7-8 students last term and asked them to indicate if they used Tik Tok and Snap Chat, nearly all the cohort signalled that they did. Both platforms are age-restricted for young people under 13 but the predominant complaint we have from parents requesting our intervention is about abuse from student to student using these platforms out of school hours.

As parents are the first educators of their children, working together is the best way forward to support our young ones to make better decisions and keep themselves safe; Netsafe enables parents to learn about, and mitigate the risks, such as taking devices off children at night, deleting age-inappropriate apps and being aware of exactly what your child is doing on their phone/device. ‘Dumb’ phones are also the smart alternative for younger children. At times, I think about getting one myself!

School policy is that Year 7-8 cell phones are collected at the start of the school day which helps us to focus on our core business of teaching and learning, but we would really appreciate your support by asking you to contact the school office though the day and not your child directly. Having calls come in during class time can lead to unnecessary conflict in classes and is not helpful. Any urgent message can be passed to your daughter via the office if needed.

The home/school partnership is important to us all and we really appreciate your continued support.

Te aroha noa me te rangimarie

Megan, Susan, Tracey, Beth and Paula.