An exciting year ahead.

Welcome back to school! It has been a long, hot summer for those who sensibly stayed in New Zealand through the Christmas and New Year period, however for me it was a cold, cold winter in the northern hemisphere visiting all my family and friends back home. I had a fabulous time away and loved seeing my family, but it is great to be back and looking forward to a really exciting new year at school.

The staff kicked off the year with a bang last week with another very successful retreat in the mountains. We set up camp at Pudding Hill Lodge and had a very productive (and fun) time planning the year for the children.

One of the main discussion points over the two days was how we can do a better job of aligning our assessment and reporting procedures. It was broadly agreed that the current written reports sent home to parents in term 4 are not feeding into the children's learning as well as we would like. The reports are too late in the year to have a direct impact on learning and need to be more reflective of what is happening in the classroom.

I asked the leadership team to write down what they believed student reports should achieve and their thoughts are shown through the wordle picture below. It is pretty clear that "Learning" is the key element and we believe that a reporting system should be a natural part of our assessment process. We would like our reporting to be reflective of what is happening in class and feeds into discussions with the children about their learning and next steps. Over last year I visited or spoke with a number of other schools to see how they report to parents about children's progress. Those visits and the discussions with the staff last week have led to us revamping the reporting process for 2009. I will post more details about this in the next few weeks along with details about a series of meetings with parents to look at the new format and gather feedback.