Winton School

1 Context

Winton is a full primary school providing education for children from Year 1 to 8. The school has experienced sustained roll growth in recent years which has led to the addition of five new classrooms. The school facilities include two technology rooms where children learn about hard and soft materials. These rooms are also used by other full primary schools in the district.

The school has a new principal since the last ERO review. There has been a number of staff changes in the last year, including in senior management. The school has participated in three Ministry of Education professional development projects: Accelerated Literacy Learning (ALL), Accelerated Learning in Mathematics (ALiM) and Positive Behaviour for Learning (PB4L).

2 Equity and excellence

The school's vision for children is that they will strive for personal excellence in academic, cultural, social and physical activities. Trustees and leaders aim to achieve this through effective governance, quality teaching, high expectations and home-school partnerships.

The school has an explicit focus on supporting all students to develop and demonstrate the Winton School values. These are respect (whakaute), effort (manawanuitanga), responsibility (takohanga) and empathy (pūaroha).

The school’s achievement information shows that for the last two years just over half of the Māori children have achieved at expected levels in relation to the National Standards in reading, writing and mathematics. Most other children achieve well in relation to National Standards in reading and mathematics. Achievement in writing is slightly lower. The school has had multiple priorities in recent years. It is now time for trustees and school leaders to focus more urgently on lifting the achievement of those children who are at risk of not achieving National Standards, particularly Māori children.

Since the last ERO evaluation, the school has:

• developed a new vision and set of values in consultation with its school community
• introduced a school-wide positive behaviour education programme
• strengthened school-wide guidelines and expectations for quality teaching and professional practice
• developed and improved systems for identifying and monitoring the progress of priority learners
• built internal capability to accelerate the progress and achievement of children needing additional support in writing and mathematics
• conducted a governance self review of the school's responsiveness to Māori children and whānau.

3 Accelerating achievement

How effectively does this school respond to Māori children whose learning and achievement need acceleration?

The school is developing achievement targets, plans and practices to enable it to better respond to Māori children whose learning and achievement need acceleration. While school achievement information shows that Māori achievement levels have been of concern for a number of years, this had not resulted in specific achievement targets. In 2016, however, all Māori children who are not achieving at National Standards are targeted to have their learning accelerated.

How effectively does this school respond to all children whose learning and achievement need acceleration?

Achievement information shows that a low proportion of the children identified by the school as needing to accelerate their progress in reading and writing in 2015 did so. Efforts to accelerate student progress in mathematics were more successful.

Leaders and teachers are continuing to improve the systems for identifying and monitoring children needing additional support with their learning. Leaders need to make better use of detailed classroom information to track and analyse needs and trends across the school and over time. This will support more timely identification of needs and planned actions to lift achievement.

4 School conditions

How effectively do the school’s curriculum and other organisational processes and practices develop and enact the school’s vision, values, goals and priorities for equity and excellence?

Children at Winton School benefit from a rich and responsive curriculum which is well aligned to the school's vision and values. Teachers use children's interests and activities as a way of engaging them in their learning. Older children have many leadership opportunities and valued roles to play, including supporting and mentoring younger children. Children are proud of their school. Teachers value children's language, culture and identity. The importance of language, culture and identity should be more strongly expressed through all school documentation, for example in curriculum guidelines and the strategic plan.

The school has a focus on building effective home-school partnerships. Parents and whānau have frequent opportunities to learn about their child's learning and progress and how they can support this at home. This is provided in varied forms including written, online, face-to-face and through parent information meetings. Parents told ERO they feel welcome in their child's classroom, as valued partners in supporting learning. The school wants to improve the depth and quality of its relationships with Māori whānau. It introduced termly meetings with whānau in 2015 and leaders know they need to continue to build and strengthen this connection in 2016.

Trustees and the principal have high expectations for quality teaching. This is evident in the ongoing:

• development of clear expectations and guidelines for teaching and learning
• focus on improving the consistency and reliability of overall-teacher judgements
• work to describe how Education Council requirements should be evident in the school
• encouragement and support for teachers to reflect critically on their teaching.

The principal has put in place new leadership structures in 2016 to make better use of internal expertise to support teaching practice. A number of curriculum teams (literacy, numeracy, science and cultural) have been created to build and share good practice. The priority for these teams will be ensuring that what is learned from professional development is sustained and embedded across the school. In time, the leaders will need to evaluate how well these teams support school-wide practices and contribute to expected outcomes.

Teachers help children to know about their learning, progress and achievement. Teachers know the children well as learners and as individuals. They are using achievement information well to plan how to support children in their classes. Team leaders are regularly discussing children's progress with teachers.

The principal and leaders provide trustees with achievement information. This information needs to:

• be better analysed and include evaluative commentary about what has worked and why
• include information that shows how well all learning support interventions have accelerated student progress within the school
• make recommendations about what is needed to further support children and their learning, or programmes that may be required.

Through recent review, trustees have identified the need to raise student achievement, particularly for Māori children, as a key priority. The school's strategic plan should be simplified so that this focus is more prominent. Raising student achievement should also be explicit in all other systems, including annual plans and appraisal goals for the principal and teachers.

5 Going forward

How well placed is the school to achieve and sustain equitable and excellent outcomes for all children?

Leaders and teachers:

• know the children whose learning and achievement need to be accelerated
• respond to the strengths, needs and interests of each child
• regularly evaluate how teaching is working for these children
• do not always or systematically act on what they know works for each child
• have a plan in place but have not yet built teacher capability effectively to achieve equitable outcomes for all children.

Trustees and leaders are motivated to make improvements. From the beginning of 2016, they have shown a stronger focus and determination to improve the achievement of children whose learning needs accelerating. They acknowledge that raising the achievement of Māori children is now an important priority. They are in the early stages of developing plans to achieve and sustain equitable and excellent outcomes for all children. Planning needs to be further developed to prioritise the specific actions trustees and leaders need to take. Trustees and leaders need to ensure ongoing monitoring to evaluate the impact of what they do.

Action: The board, principal and teachers should use the findings of this evaluation, the Effective School Evaluation resource, the Internal Evaluation: Good Practice exemplars and the School Evaluation Indicators to develop a Raising Achievement Plan to further develop processes and practices that respond effectively to the strengths and needs of children whose learning and achievement need to be accelerated.

As part of this review ERO will continue to monitor the school’s Raising Achievement Plan and the progress the school makes. ERO is likely to carry out the next full review in three years.

6 Board assurance on legal requirements

Before the review the board of trustees and principal of the school completed the ERO board assurance statement and Self Audit Checklists. In these documents they attested that they had taken all reasonable steps to meet their legislative obligations related to the following:

• Board administration.
• Curriculum.
• Management of health, safety and welfare.
• Personnel management.
• Asset management.

During the review, ERO checked the following items because they have a potentially high impact on student safety and wellbeing:

• Emotional safety of students (including prevention of bullying and sexual harassment).
• Physical safety of students.
• Teacher registration.
• Processes for appointing staff.
• Stand down, suspensions, expulsions and exclusions.
• Attendance.
• Compliance with the provisions of the Vulnerable Children Act 2014.

Chris Rowe

Deputy Chief Review Officer Southern (Acting)

24 May 2016

About the school