Good afternoon,
In 2019, the Board and Senior Management Team undertook a survey of our teachers, students, and whanau to better understand what matters to our school community. We appreciate the time everyone took to provide us with their feedback.
To recap, the key results of the 2019 survey were that:
- We have a great school that cultivates a strong Catholic character, which helps to create an environment where our children feel safe, loved, and inspired to succeed;
- Our community feels a high level of confidence and respect for our teachers and support staff;
- Our teachers enjoy working at St. Joseph’s and are proud of its reputation in the community;
- Our reporting processes, celebrations of success and communication channels were areas that we could continue to build on.
We listened to the survey results, as well as considering feedback received via our other channels, and used this to inform our 2020 strategic planning process and action plan. Although this year has presented challenges none of us would have ever anticipated, we have been able to put our plan into action to:
- Maintain our focus on supporting our students to reach their full potential;
- Support our students (and their whanau) to continue their programme of learning – whether at school or online;
- Provide support and pastoral care to our staff, students and whanau to help them adapt to the challenges created by Covid-19;
- Build on our reporting processes to provide parents with more detail regarding their child’s progress and better explaining how assessments are made; and
- Refine and build on how we communicate with our community including:
- providing regular updates via our school newsletters and home group communications;
- integrating new technology platforms into our learning environment to enable more opportunities for feedback between our teachers, students and their whanau;
- changing the day all school prayers are held to a Friday to enable more members of our community to attend; and
- implementing new internal meeting policies reducing administrative meeting requirements for our staff.
As we now look ahead to 2021, we are looking to run the survey again. When you receive a link to the survey, we ask that you take the time to fill it in as your feedback is important to us.
Your responses to the 2020 survey will help our Board and Senior Management Team to measure the impact of the changes made over the past 12-months, along with helping us to understand more about what the priorities are for our community as we plan for the year ahead.
Before signing off, we would also like to acknowledge the work of our amazing teachers and support staff for their efforts in enabling our students to continue their learning throughout this extremely challenging year. We would also like to thank you for your ongoing support of our school and for your role in helping us to implement the online programme of learning during each of this year’s lockdown. Our testing and results show that, thanks to our joint efforts, our students have continued to make excellent progress this year.
If you have any questions regarding the points outlined in this email or the survey itself, please feel free to contact Alister at any time.
Regards,
Alister Bridgman & Riaan Geldenhuys
Principal Board Chair
On behalf of the St. Joseph’s School Takapuna Board and Senior Management Team