Aaron West comments on how review led to a re-evaluation of school goals

In Term 3 we used the Self-review Tool for Teachers to support our review of the National Standards. With the support of a School Support Services adviser we altered the format of the tool, which enabled us to use it more effectively for our purposes.

We chose questions in the tool that were particularly relevant to what we wanted to know at this time. We answered them with a real sense of needing to provide the evidence to support the answers we gave.

As an outcome of this review we identified three main areas for on-going action: assessment for learning, reporting, and writing, used as the context to explore the first two. We saw that we needed to develop further pedagogical content knowledge in writing, so this context made sense to us.

As part of the review it became clear that it was timely for us to re-look at our strategic school goals as the current school goals no longer reflected where we knew we need to go as a school. We are sharing our annual goals here. The action plan that goes with this extrapolates the assessment for learning, reporting and professional learning in writing.

At the end of 2011 we look forward to having a clear alignment between strategic and annual goals.

Vicki Robinson explains how developing a new school vision impacted on planning

Over the last three years our school has spent a great deal of time focusing on the development of the new curriculum and designing a vision that encapsulates the many aspects of Pokuru School. We have 105 years of history and represent populations from traditional rural backgrounds and those from an urban way of life. We believe in our motto “respect the past and support the future”.

With this stage of development completed we recognised that our charter and annual plan no longer aligned effectively with our new school vision. We also became aware of how "annualized" our planning has been and how we needed to review this development process.

To work out priorities for our strategic plan we first used the Self-review Tools with the staff on a teacher only day, then with the board during a review session. We consulted with parents, local groups and other groups that contribute to our school. During this time we also had an ERO review which allowed us an opportunity to incorporate their guidelines for improvement.

During Term 4, 2010 we were able to collate all these ideas and formulate a strategic plan and annual plan that gives accurate and informed guidelines for the future direction of Pokuru School.