President's Message
He aroha whakatō, he aroha ka puta mai.
If kindness is sown, then kindness is what you shall receive.
Kia ora e te whānau
Last week was my final executive meeting as President of NZPF. I want to thank the executive members, former executive members, Ministry staff, sector leaders, NZPF staff and my whanau for their humorous and heartfelt speeches and for organizing this superb send off for me. I was deeply humbled.
In this week’s Principal Matters I want to acknowledge all of you. As President, I have travelled the country to join you at your regional events. You are the ones who have kept me in touch with the realities of your day to day life as principals. You are the ones who have inspired me throughout my tenure and kept me focused on those issues that are most relevant and pressing. You set my agenda for the work I do on reference and advisory groups in Wellington, in parliament and with the media. Ngā mihi kia kotou katoa.
Education Work Programme Overview and Status Update
Many of you ask me about the big picture for the future of education, and how all the different work streams fit together.
The Ministry has developed a diagram which will help you see that bigger picture and how the different work strands fit together. It will be continually updated as the work progresses, but I hope it may provide a useful guide for you. Click here to access the diagram.
ERO Leadership Partners Programme
ERO has launched the Leadership Partners’ Programme for school principals and senior leaders. It is a joint initiative between ERO and the sector.
This unique professional learning opportunity offers principals and senior leaders an opportunity to train and join review teams as partners in ERO’s external school evaluation process for two weeks each term during 2020.
It aims to extend leaders’ understanding of external evaluation practice and better appreciate the links between internal and external evaluation. It will also help develop insights into your own school by contributing to reviewing others.
The process is now underway to select a pilot group who will undergo an induction programme in January 2020 and begin reviewing in Term One.
Further information can be found here.
Recent Announcements
Property
You may have seen Sunday’s announcement by the Prime Minister about the School Investment Package, a one-off capital injection for state schools to help them accelerate and bring forward urgent school property improvements. You can read the Prime Minister’s press release here.
As part of the package, all eligible schools will get $693 per student, determined by their July 2019 school roll. Each school will receive a minimum of $50,000 and a maximum of $400,000 to be spent within the next 24 months. Special schools will receive a flat rate of $200,000, to recognise the complexity and cost of special school property despite having generally smaller rolls.
Schools should select projects from their existing 10YPP that can be initiated soon and be delivered within the two-year timeframe. You do not need to take into account the priority of the project under the 10YPP framework.
The Ministry will be contacting all eligible schools over the coming weeks to let them know about the funding and to answer any questions.
Further information will also be available on the Ministry website later this week.
PISA Results
You will have heard through the media that the latest PISA results show that New Zealand rankings have dropped slightly in reading and writing and a little more so in maths. We also have truancy issues and bullying issues and the gap between our brightest and poorer achievers is big.
The results did not surprise me. What we are seeing are the results of 9 years of national standards and the growth in poverty. We know that it will take some time to reverse the trends as we build up the focus on our curriculum again and start to address the appalling child poverty statistics. We also have some excellent initiatives to enhance cultural responsiveness which will help our young Māori to be more successful and we are working on similar initiatives for our young Pasifika students.
The most disturbing finding was the percentage of our young people reporting that they do not read for pleasure or read as little as possible. 52% of students said that they only read if they have to. 43% do not read for enjoyment. There may be many factors at play here including social media and other internet activities, but we do not have the research to back this up.
Have a great week and keep your energy levels up for all those end of year functions!
Ngā manaakitanga
Whetu Cormick
whetu@nzpf.ac.nz