Salisbury School (Nelson)

Te Ara Huarau | School Profile Report

Background

This Profile Report was written within 4 months of the Education Review Office and Salisbury School (Nelson) working in Te Ara Huarau, an improvement evaluation approach used in most English Medium State and State Integrated Schools. For more information about Te Ara Huarau see ERO’s website. www.ero.govt.nz

Context 

Salisbury School provides residential care and education for girls aged from 8 to 15 years who have complex learning and social needs. The school is located in Richmond, Nelson and is a member of the Waimea Kāhui Ako/Community of Learning. The vision, of ‘Transformative success leading to greater possibilities in life and living beyond Salisbury for ākonga and whānau’, underpins practices across the day school and the hostel.

Salisbury School (Nelson)’s strategic priorities for improving outcomes for learners are:

• well-developed relationships and sustainable educational pathways

• to broaden and innovate sustainable cross-campus practices and programmes

• redevelopment of the campus and facilities.

You can find a copy of the school’s strategic and annual plan on Salisbury School (Nelson)’s website.

ERO and the school are working together to evaluate growth of an effective, responsive, localised curriculum, with associated teaching and learning practices.

The rationale for selecting this evaluation is:

• the school has undergone an extensive revisioning process, fostering students’ greater potential and possibilities in life, which is driving the collaborative creation of a new localised curriculum

• the developing campus-wide curriculum, purposefully connects residential and day-school practices to provide wrap-around support for girls to achieve their individual goals

• leaders are growing shared staff’s understandings of the vision, values, pedagogy and practices with a collective focus on promoting positive outcomes for students.

The school expects to see students driving their learning with agency and voice, confident in their identities, and focused on a successful transition to their home schools and communities. The teaching team will be well connected to the residential team in a one-campus approach to creating a collaborative living and learning curriculum. Signature pedagogies and teaching and learning approaches will underpin personalised practices across the campus, fostering well-considered transitions for the students.

Families will experience rich and meaningful partnerships with the school throughout all stages of transition into, across and from the school. Whānau and iwi will engage together in partnership to shape the design of learning practices and learning spaces, surfacing shared priorities and culturally significant aspects of the place-based curriculum.

Strengths

The school can draw from the following strengths to support the school in its goal to grow an effective, responsive, localised curriculum, with associated teaching and learning practices:

• Students' holistic strengths and needs are at the heart of practice and pedagogy, with a focus on supporting successful transitions and life pathways beyond the school.

• Strong improvement focused leadership has a systematic, collaborative focus on consistency and capability-building at all levels of the school with clarity of strategic vision, values, aims, goals, roles and responsibilities.

• Multiple voices, including students and their whānau and families, inform tailored goals, programmes, tools and strategies.

• Leaders have developed a Learner Capability Framework, designed to identify students’ progress through the curriculum, supporting evidence-based planning and assessment.

Where to next?

Moving forward, the school will prioritise:

• enacting plans to develop professional capability and collective capacity, to implement the Learner Capability Framework and localised curriculum in practice

• building on well-developed relationships to create purposeful partnerships that foster holistic success for learners, including with whānau Māori and iwi.

ERO’s role will be to support the school in its evaluation for improvement cycle to improve outcomes for all learners. ERO will support the school in reporting their progress to the community. The next public report on ERO’s website will be a Te Ara Huarau | School Evaluation Report and is due within three years.

Shelley Booysen
Director of Schools

1 November 2023

About the School

The Education Counts website provides further information about the school’s student population, student engagement and student achievement.  educationcounts.govt.nz/home

This school has boarding facilities for all students, which ERO reports on in a separate Hostel Report.