Our children, our whanau, our community
Our children, our whanau, our community
This has implications for events held at school, communicating with families, building relationships with them and attempting to partner with them to understand and help their child with their learning. We have made administration changes to enrolment forms to accommodate the variety of whanau make up, to ensure that we are inclusive and so we can help the children to understand themselves, where they have come from and what identity they have.
Government support to get children into Early Childhood Centres has increased and the demand on parents to get back to work has and is making a difference to how we are able to communicate with our whanau. We run the Mutukaroa programme to develop partnerships with whanau and to help them to know how to help their child. The number of home visits or visits to work outside of traditional 9am - 3pm school hours to engage with these families is on the increase. Weekend and night time demands are increasing as families are tied into working because their children are attending Early Childhood Centres or School. Families are having to work to cover the increasing costs of housing, electricity and food. The Trends Shaping Education 2016 report and the New Zealand Government statistics indicate that early access to Early Childhood Education results in higher school achievement and life outcomes but for many of our already disadvantaged families we are not seeing the outcomes of this when children arrive at school.
They have increased the participation rates but at what cost. The New Zealand Government has taken away the need for 80% - 100% of teachers on site in all centres to be qualified. It is now 50%. And not all of those 50% need to be on the floor talking and supporting the children. Are all our children able to access high quality early childhood education in our area that supports their identity and culture? This is a question we are currently thinking about as we try to find solutions for our whanau and children arriving at school without the oral language skills to be ready to learn, without the basic literacy and numeracy skills to build upon and without the knowledge to celebrate who they are as a person.
We incorporate cultural celebrations and celebrations for grandparents day, mother's day and father's day. We tell our children that any older female that is a role model is welcome to our Mother's Day celebration and the same for Father's Day. We love that families take time off to come along to these celebration days as for some it is the only time they enter the school gate due to work commitments. For others it is a day that they feel safe to enter the school grounds because they haven't had a great sense of belonging when they were at school. We welcome those people who can come along to come and share their skills as role models for our students. Everyone has something to share and we want our students to see that in our school we are diverse and that diversity is something to cherish.
The trend of families moving away from what has been a traditional make up is already making an impact on what we provide, how we provide it and for whom we provide it. To be a school that prides itself on its community feel we will need to continue to change and adapt to ensure that our children and their wide group of whanau feel comfortable about themselves, their preferences and that we accommodate diversity.
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