SMS – Supporting learner pathways

We're using KAMAR in three different ways, to track and monitor student progress and achievement throughout the school.

So the first one is through our academic mentoring program, which involves every child in the school, and their families, their whānau, and their form teacher as a significant adult.

At the moment we have an academic conference that's held at the beginning of term two, that involved both the form teacher and the child, and obviously the parent or caregiver. The goals that are set in that conference, are obviously put into KAMAR for us to refer to, and for the form teacher then to ensure they're having conversations around those goals on a regular basis. Some of those might be informal conversations, or they might be more formal conversations, where they sit down with the child, they reflect on the goal, they update it, maybe put some strategies in place that are going to assist with learning into the future.

We use the profile area in KAMAR as an essential repository for everything around academic mentoring for that child. We have a lot of information that the form teacher can access there in one central hub, so that includes such things as target setting, so that's goals that the student has discussed with the form teacher and with their parents, that's stored as an official interview on the system. That can be accessed by the students at home, via the parent portal, and by the parents obviously as well. Also, in that profile area, we have information around vocational pathways, the various standards that students are sitting, how many credits, if they're a senior student, that they're sitting in each subject, and how they're tracking towards achieving the standards they're being entered into as well in the senior school.

It might be estimated grades - we band our students into three different bands around their grades - and we tend to put a lot of effort into our amber light students. They're the students that we know, with some interventions, we're really going to assist them to get over the line in terms of their personal goal for the year.

So when we're setting targets around those students, I guess we're using a whole range of information across SMS, but in particular we'll look back at their individual goals that are stored through the profile area. We'll look back to obviously their pastoral records. We have quite extensive pastoral records, all staff are involved in keeping pastoral notes around each child. And obviously back through attendance information, and also working alongside parents and whānau to ensure that we have the right pathway moving forward for that child.

Any students that have specific learning needs, we use the notes area of KAMAR to ensure that all the information is readily available to staff. Those students are tagged on KAMAR, they have a tag that appears on the mark book on the school roll, so the teacher knows, that for that particular child, there are strategies in place that will assist with the learning process.

They can also look at any learning interventions and strategies that have been listed or brainstormed with our staff that are stored in that area.

So the main benefit of using SMS as a central repository for all the information about a student is simply that the information is easy to find, it's clear, it's accessible to everyone. Some information is obviously available for the parents and students to reflect on themselves as well, but really it's just a central repository for everyone to be able to get a very clear picture about learning around that child.