Wairakei School Community Consultation Response document - July 2017 

Swimming Programme:

Every year we go to Jellie Park for Swimming Lessons and we have made our booking as close to the end of the year as possible. We would like to know if you would like to continue this.

Response:

There is overwhelming support to maintain the status quo - that is, providing off site swimming and water safety skills from trained staff at Jellie Park in a two week (10 consecutive lesson) block.

Your child’s well-being

The Ministry of Education have a focus on well-being because it is of paramount importance for children to be safe and happy at school. The children will be completing our 'well-being" survey again next term. How would you rate Wairakei School's general well-being status currently?

Response:

While 76% of respondents report that it is a happy place to be for their children, there are 24% who were moderately happy. When analysing the comments, the general tone was that the staff and school are doing well with supporting children with challenges and making others feel safe, but more resourcing is needed to support the staff and school to deal with these challenges.

Our Board of Trustees allocates over $65,000 each year in additional funding to support our learners with learning and /or behaviour challenges. We continue to access other additional resourcing where we are able, and from a variety of supports - not just Ministry of Education. There is limited funding available nationwide for this support, and continued lobbying to Government for the extra support is required by the general public. The NZPF (NZ Principal’s Federation) is passionate about this and is on their agenda to progress further.

Where do you frequent to obtain your information?

Wairakei School has worked hard to ensure our school community has information that is communicated in a variety of ways and places. 

Response:

Email remains our preferred school communication method, and this has come out as the most frequent way of getting information. While there is still demand for written notices, there is a cost apportioned to this and it is not the most reliable method of ensuring the message gets to the right person. We do however ensure those few families who do not have email access, get a paper copy.

When analysing the comments, there are varied requests regarding digital accessibility of information from single sources to multiple sources. To ensure that we meet most of these requests, all information will now be available on all our platforms and then it is up to the user to access their most preferred. Links which go out through Hail, are automatically sized for mobile devices, which research says is the most important attribute for websites and digital content.

Our email distribution software also allows us to track who is or isn’t opening / reading their emails, which helps us to determine the best distribution method.

The website has also had an update, with requests from the comments actioned. You will notice new quick links to the most wanted information along the top.

Parent education Sessions

We would like to provide more opportunities for our parents to attend sessions on Wairakei School practices or on aspects of the New Zealand education system. We have found that attendance at the past sessions have been variable. We would like to get more attendance at these sessions. Which of the following are your preferences for attending these?

Response:

We are committed to ensuring that our parents have easy access to parent education opportunities both in our school and through other schools in our Community of Learning.

Sessions in the evening are the preferred option with 64%. Within the comments, it was suggested that 5:30pm meetings were difficult to attend.

We have subsequently held a parent information session last week on Linc-ed and made it a 6:30pm start in direct response to this. Only 6 parents attended along with 6 staff members.

We will persevere with this time slot for the next couple of sessions, however to expect our staff to work 12-13 hour days with little buy-in from the community for these sessions, is going to wear them out and is not good for themselves or their families.