ERO Insights - Term 4

Introduction from the Chief Review Officer

The driving force behind the Education Review Office | Te Tari Arotake Mātauranga (ERO) is the idea that quality education is the right of every child and young person in New Zealand. We believe that quality education is underpinned by excellent teaching and the creation of learning environments which place the learner and learner outcomes at the centre of all activity.

Successful learning organisations are those that are on a continuous, deliberate and future focussed journey of improvement, using evidence to shape their direction and decision making. These organisations use evidence and evaluation to inform teaching practices^[1] and they ensure these practices positively impact all learners, including those who are at risk of poor outcomes.

Our research shows that organisations who effectively use evidence to influence innovation, practice and improvement:

• maintain a culture of inquiry, actively seeking out evidence to underpin key decisions and actions and as a mechanism for feedback on existing practices
• ensure that their teaching staff have the skills to collect, use and interpret research, evidence and assessment information
• establish organisation-wide systems, structures and expectations to support the routine collection of data, and sharing of knowledge
• make sure that collected evidence and data is transparent and results in discernible change, and
• allow time for teaching staff to work together to review data, research and evidence to understand its implications for their practice and its impacts on learner outcomes.

ERO aims to support the improvement of our system, schools and early learning services through its programme of institutional reviews and our national research and evaluation programme. The intention of ERO Insights is to directly communicate our insights, as just one way to contribute to enhancing the quality of our system. We propose to publish four Insights annually, show casing important findings from our work in the sector.   

We also aim to use this newsletter as a way of ensuring that those working in early learning services and schools are aware of how we ourselves are continuing to evolve what we are doing to support improvement in our system. To this end and based on feedback from the sector, we have further modified our school reporting approach from Term 4 this year.

The intention is to ensure that ERO positively adds value to the schools that it reviews and the changes that we have made aim to provide greater clarity in ERO’s judgements and clarity in the advice that we provide to schools in respect of the things that they should consider in going forward.  The intention of our changes is to provide a strength based assessment of where a school is at and where they need to next focus their attention.

For early learning services our focus at the present time is looking to the level of knowledge and the approaches that services are adopting to come to understand the implications for their service of the recently refreshed Te Whāriki (2017).  Over the next 6 months we will be placing an increasing emphasis on the adoption of Te Whāriki in the practices of Early Learning Services.

I look forward to your feedback on this first edition of ERO Insights, which includes:

• Hot off the press - Teaching approaches and strategies that work
• Hauhaketia ngā taonga tuku iho kia pūawai ai
• Improvement in action: Examples of schools making a significant difference
• Supporting the transition of vulnerable learners into secondary school
• How are we doing? Educating our tamariki about physical activity, food and nutrition
• National evaluations - what's out now and coming soon...

Ngā mihi

Nicholas Pole
Chief Review Officer