St. Joseph’s School Takapuna Board Update

Good afternoon,

We welcome you back for term 4 and we hope everyone has had a relaxing and safe break over the holiday period. It was a busy term 3, concluding with a visit from ERO, which we would like to update you on, together with the community survey results.

ERO Visit

Over the last few weeks of term 3, the ERO team was on-site to review our school. The team met with Alister and our senior leadership team, and also spent time observing lessons and activities throughout the school. While the official report will take some time to come through, the preliminary verbal feedback received provided a glowing endorsement of our school, teachers and the way the curriculum is implemented.

We would like to take the opportunity to thank Alister, the senior leadership team, teachers and support staff for all the work they put into supporting EROs visit, and for their ongoing efforts to educate and engage our students in their learning.

AskYourTeam Community Survey

Thank you to everyone who responded to the recent AskYourTeam survey. There were 186 responses from 625 invitations to provide feedback, as all adults registered as the caregivers of our students were sent the survey to complete (meaning some households received multiple invitations).

There is always the opportunity to provide feedback in real-time to your children’s teachers, the leadership team, and Alister. The purpose of this survey is to understand more broadly what is working well within our school, along with areas for improvement. As similar questions are asked each year, and this is now our fourth year of conducting the survey, we’re also able to track trends.

The average of the parent/whānau responses was 84%, with 0% being the least desirable and 100% being the most. This means that across every metric, our whanau community sits somewhere between agree and strongly disagree.

In last year’s survey (2022) we saw a very slight dip in the results compared with the prior year (2021). This year we have seen an improvement on most questions, so that the average is now slightly higher than in 2021. We have included a table of key responses as an appendix, as we think it’s important for those who participated to see the results, and for the community as a whole to understand what we are being told through this feedback tool. AYT Survey 2023

Highlights from our community responses this year included that you feel our school provides an environment where our children feel safe, supported, respected and inspired by their learning and to succeed.

We were also pleased to see that you believe that we provide good opportunities for whānau to be involved in the school and that communication between the school and parents continues to improve (which was a key focus area for the school this year).

From our students perspective, they enjoy being part of our school, have a strong understanding of the schools values and feel safe and secure. They believe that their teachers think they can succeed, and they appreciate the different ways that their teachers help them to learn.

In terms of areas that we can continue to build on, the main area for improvement that was raised was that you would like more opportunities to provide honest feedback, ideas and suggestions on how to improve the school.

We appreciate everyone who took the time to provide feedback through the survey. These results – alongside the feedback provided by our community throughout the year – are important resources for our Board and management team and help inform our planning as we move forward.

Around The School

Other points we would like to highlight from term 3 include:

• Book Week: The Board would also like to acknowledge and thank our librarian, Megan, the teachers and all the parent helpers for their support of another successful book week. This event is always a highlight in the school calendar and Megan continues to raise the bar every year, helping to
  instill a real love of reading amongst our students.
• PTFA Support: We would also like to thank the PTFA for its continued support. Term three saw the PTFA host a very successful musical bingo night and support a number of other initiatives, including hosting the morning tea after First Holy Communion. We appreciate the efforts thePTFA puts in to, not only fundraise for our school, but also in providing opportunities for our community to come together.
• Property Updates: The building work has now been completed on the old library in our administration block. Our contractors have now begun the process of removing the old junior playground and installing a fantastic new one that we are sure will delight all our students. Thank you again to the PTFA and our community for all their fundraising efforts over the past few years that have allowed us to move forward with this project.

As always, we appreciate the ongoing support of everyone within our community. We hope all of our students have come back from the holiday period ready for a fantastic and action-packed term four!

Eric Esnouf, Presiding Member
On behalf of the St. Joseph’s School Board

A very warm welcome to our new students in Term 4:

Elijah, Ella, Enzo, Jack, James, Jonathan, Leo, Lily, Priel, Rianna, Ryan and Scion

We are so happy you & your families have joined our wonderful community here at St Joseph’s 🙂 

Thank you to all the parents, grandparents and parishioners who joined us at our Mercy Day Mass. It was wonderful to celebrate with our Sister of Mercy.

We received this feedback from one of the Sisters of Mercy:

“We Sisters are truly grateful to have been able to celebrate your Mercy day with you all today. Thank you for inviting us. The Mass was joyful and prayerful, with senior students assisting/guiding younger students so beautifully. I was truly amazed during the homily as the students were so attentive. Monsignor David only had to ask each question once, and hands were flying with answers. I’ve never been aware of such attention before.”

As a staff we were very proud of all our students. It was a truly uplifting experience for us all.

We are collecting food items for the parish Food Bank as we head towards the Christmas season. If your child is able to do a small chore in return for a non-perishable food item it would be much appreciated. Thank you to the very generous families who have contributed significantly to the food bank over the year.

It’s finished!!! A huge thank you to the PTFA, the Mary Thomas whanau and the Board of Trustees for the AWESOME new junior playground. It has been built over the holidays and has been completed yesterday. Our thanks to the Playground Centre for designing it and to the Playworks team for installing it.

It will provide our Kiwi and Kea students a wonderful range of activities to play with (and on) over their morning tea and lunch breaks. The Kakapo and Kakariki students will be able to play on it when they have home group exercise breaks.

Our students are very fortunate to have such an amazing learning environment. Thank you to our parent community, past and present, who have supported the PTFA fundraisers and pay the school contributions. These allow us to provide the facilities and activities for the amazing learning experiences that our children have here at our school.

Please ensure your children have a school hat to wear in their breaks, when playing outside. All students are expected to wear hats, when outside, in Terms 1 & 4. Thank you so much for your support with this sun protection procedure.

In the last week of term 3, we saw the completion of the refurbished learning space. Our thanks to the Auckland Diocese Catholic Office and the Board of Trustees for their support of this project. It further enhances our learning environment for the students. This term will see it being used for the Jellybeans Music programme , which begins Monday next week. Next year it will be a learning space for one of our home groups. Thanks to Q Construction for the great job that they did with this project and the way they worked closely with the school to ensure minimum disruption for the children and teachers.

Last term ended with an AWESOME sharing of the cultures we had been focussing on throughout the term. Thank you to all the students, teachers and parents who supported this event. What an amazing coming together, in unity, to celebrate the diverse world we live in. The energy, colour and joy was outstanding.

 This is the final call for Yummy sticker sheets to be returned to the school office. Please turn them into the office no later than Monday, October 17th. We swap these for Sports equipment for our school and your help is much appreciated.

Please check out the latest community notices  which you can find on our school website.