Burnham School Values and Skills

Below is a slideshow depicting the top-rated values and the top-rated skills parents felt were most important for our children:

What do you think?

Curriculum Research Interim Results

I'm pleased to provide you with our interim results from our curriculum survey from our recent Meet The Teacher evening. These results show us what parents felt were the most important values and skills we want for our tamariki in the future. They give us insight into what we, as a community, believe to be most important to develop in our children.

This data is generated from responses by approximately 54 adults and a couple of children. This means that while it represents a large proportion of our community, it is not everyone. An important next step for us is to see what the students themselves think and for you to comment on this blog post - do you agree or not and (most importantly) why?

Below is the table showing the sorted results, we will represent this graphically so it is 'prettier' to view:


If you have not contributed to this data and want to, please download/print and hand in this form or email your votes for the four values and four skills to principal@burnham.school.nz (1 = most important). This may change the results!

Future Learning Survey

We have put a special survey on the school web site that is aimed at gaining your thoughts on what is great about our school, what you feel needs to be strengthened, plus your ideas for what our children's future learning environment needs to include. Thank you to those parents who have taken the time to respond and share their ideas already - we need more! 

Everything we do in our school is part of the 'curriculum' in one way or another, so it is important that everyone has a say in this process. We plan on giving children more of say in the design of how they learn in future, and one way we are starting this is to allow children to nominate others for showing excellence.

Please click here to go to the page for our Future Learning survey...

Teacher Only Day - Burnham Curriculum

The New Zealand National Curriculum has been revised and is updated so that schools can determine how it is implemented for their community. The vision for the new curriculum is very exciting, it states that we want lifelong learners who are confident, connected, and actively involved.

This is a great opportunity for us as a school, because we are able to design our future curriculum so that we best prepare our tamariki for the future. It is our chance to develop the competencies that work for our kids and will guide us in our partnership between home and school. It is also an opportunity to strengthen our partnership so we are all working towards the same goals and using the same language.

Our process started on Friday 4th September with our first Teacher Only Day. From my perspective as the new Principal this was a great opportunity to work with the teachers prior to starting on October 12.

The day involved staff coming up with ideas for what they want for our learners for the future, looking at the NZ curriculum and engaging in dialogue with tamariki and parents about what they feel is most important. The ideas was to interview families to look for ways in which we will consult more widely with our community in the future, as well as to generate some initial ideas.

Don't worry if you weren't able to contribute to this day, all families, children and community members will be opportunities to share ideas on what we want for the future learning for Burnham tamariki. We will take the amazing range of strengths of the school and build these into the new design for our future curriculum.

Some of the ideas generated include that children:

• develop the confidence to be successful in high school and beyond.
• develop strong ICT skills.
• develop skills that are useful and practical, especially teamwork skills.
• are able to take increasing control over their learning, having choice over both what they learn and how they learn.
• have fun when they learn.

Please note that these ideas are by no means exhaustive, and you and your family will have your own, these are only initial ideas. There will be opportunities for students, parents and community members to contribute to the process of developing the Burnham School curriculum.

I invite you to make comments on this blog with your own ideas as comments to this blog post.