Duration: 1:38
Graeme Barber, Principal at Woodend School, explains one of their cluster goals – supporting Māori learners to be successful. He discusses the process of inviting feedback from whānau to gauge where they are at in terms of supporting Māori learners and where they would like to go next.
One of our cluster goals is learner success for Māori. We started going through with a contractor, Raewyn Tipene-Clark, what it looked like at our school and across the cluster. She basically went through and scanned and looked at everything we had in our school that was indicating where our children were going, our goals, our vision, all of our key documents including ERO reports to see what the landscape looked like. She met with us and we then went through and looked and worked out opportunities and prompts that we might consider moving forward. The cluster met and went through that and went through a very honest and open opportunity to start developing some hunches and developing next steps and so we started setting up some goals together, for schools and for the whole cluster.
A good example of that recently was a whānau hui for all the cluster parents and staff. We went to the local marae and spent a day there unpacking some of the next steps and creating some ownership as to where we were going. There was a combination of things that we’re doing to enable the next steps for student learning to be progressed within the school, so how we engage with them and if we engage well with our Māori students, then all students will benefit. And then there was some more visionary stuff in terms of our goal setting exercise. Now those prompts that had come from the report, our board, and all boards, have been invited to take them on board as part of their strategic planning review and directions for next year.