Holy Family School (Wanaka)

Te Ara Huarau | School Profile Report

Background

This Profile Report was written within eight months of the Education Review Office and Holy Family School (Wanaka) 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

Holy Family School is a state-integrated Catholic primary school for children from years 0 to 8 in Wanaka, Central Otago. Its charism and Catholic values underpin the school community, bringing a strong sense of belonging. The school’s mission is to provide a balanced, innovative education responsive to individual needs.

Holy Family School (Wanaka)’s strategic priorities for improving outcomes for learners are:

• educationally powerful connections and relationships: community collaboration and partnerships extend and enrich opportunities for students to become confident, connected, actively involved, lifelong learners 
• a responsive curriculum: students learn, achieve and progress in the breadth and depth of The New Zealand Curriculum
• professional capability and collective capacity: teachers engage in professional learning opportunities, increasing their knowledge and skills, developing adaptive expertise and improving the quality of teaching and organisational change.

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

ERO and the school are working together to evaluate the impact of providing all children with equitable opportunities to reach their full potential in applying their learning across the curriculum.

The rationale for selecting this evaluation is:

• to develop greater transference of knowledge and skills across the curriculum, based on experience gained through the school’s successes with structured learning approaches to develop foundational skills
• through current robust processes for tracking learner achievement, the school intends to continue to ensure equity for all students. 

The school expects to see:

• students transferring literacy and numeracy skills across the curriculum, leveraged from established and effective structured learning approaches 
• the continued building of staff capability in transferable skill development through the school’s coaching model and whole school professional learning.

Strengths 

The school can draw from the following strengths to support its goal to evaluate the impact of providing all children with equitable opportunities to reach their full potential in applying their learning across the curriculum:

• strategic leadership and relational trust across the school community, enabling the school to be highly responsive to learners’ needs, abilities and interests
• strong curriculum leadership with coherent, high quality teaching practices and learning approaches that enable all learners to gain personal success.
• the progress and achievement of each learner is closely monitored as they move through the school.

Where to next?

Moving forward, the school will prioritise:

• continuing to build and embed high-quality teaching, based on research-based pedagogy, to meet the diverse abilities of all learners.
• developing the use of skills and knowledge from students’ literacy and numeracy learning and transferring them into learning across other areas of the curriculum.

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

6 June 2024 

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