Promoting Success for Māori Students: Schools’ Progress (June 2010)* 05/10/2010

Initiatives to improve Māori student presence in primary schools

Most primary schools had at least one initiative in place to maintain or improve good levels of attendance. Many of these initiatives were school-wide and did not specifically target Māori as a group. Examples were:

• providing personal contact with parents and whānau, including home visits
• assisting and supporting parents and whānau (eg referrals to community agencies, provision of supplementary food)
• increasing community involvement in the school through home-school partnership
• improving pastoral care systems, such as setting up a special needs committee to respond to identified concerns.

Some primary schools measured the impact of initiatives they had put in place. These were generally the schools that had high quality information about Māori students’ presence, which made it possible for them to track trends and changes closely.

Most schools had only informal or anecdotal evidence of the outcomes of initiatives, and a few did not know whether what they had done was effective or not.