Enhancing staff capability at Newtown School

By Education Gazette editors

Issue: Volume 101, Number 7

Posted: 8 June 2022

Reference #: 1HAUSs

Many schools are exploring ways to boost the capability of their staff to help support the needs of every child and their family, including Wellington’s Newtown School.

Playtime at Newtown School

Newtown School’s central philosophy is simple: this is everybody’s school. The inner-city Wellington school has a culturally diverse roll of 360 students with a wide range of needs.

The school’s expectation is that all tamariki feel at home in the classroom from day one, regardless of the complexity of their needs. Tamariki with high and complex needs work with multiple members of the teaching assistant team right from the beginning. Teaching assistants are part of a team that shares clear and specific expectations for the students’ individual learning journeys.

Deputy principal with the learning support portfolio, Justine Henderson, feels this approach is setting children up for success at Newtown School. Tamariki become less dependent and more confident; they develop flexibility and independence, she says.

“Children are the best teachers of other children. Through observing and modelling, tamariki develop crucial skills to play, learn and get along with others.”

Newtown School is also working with the Ministry and the Resource Teachers: Learning & Behaviour (RTLB) service to pilot a model based on Universal Design for Learning. The model aims to provide a tiered system for supporting the wide range of needs of children within a flexible learning environment.

“We’re implementing this model in our whānau spaces with strategies to support all our learners. It’s promising. The theory is good; the application we’re still exploring,” says Justine.

Building workforce capability

An important part of the model, and enabling inclusive learning in general, is delivering professional learning and development (PLD) opportunities for all staff at Newtown School.

The new PLD priorities, which include cultural capability, assessment for learning, and local curriculum design, are expected to help support the shift to a more inclusive system. There are seven PLD priorities in total across English and Māori medium.

Principal at the time, Mark Brown supports the new PLD priorities, however he believes more needs to be covered in this area in initial teacher education.

“There are so many demands within the course of training a teacher, but what are the core things that should be taught so that we understand our tamariki?” he says.

“It’s so important that teachers understand that inclusion is more than the narrow band of just looking at learner needs. Actually, there's so much more to inclusion, around diversity, culture, whānau and communities. For me, it's around building capability within our staff, but also within our education system. I think we are down a track of openly talking about it, however we're touching the tip of the iceberg.”

Keep pushing to the edges

Justine is up front about the challenges that come with building an inclusive learning environment at their school.

“Finding time for teaching assistants to upskill, and support them with that, is a real challenge,” says Justine.

She would also love to see more flexibility introduced around resourcing. Funding can limit the effective delivery of a programme, she says. “But no matter what the barrier, it’s our duty to meet the needs of the children regardless. It’s about pushing beyond the 80 percent, right to the edges. It’s about understanding the hopes and dreams of every learner and their family.”

Mark Brown says the inclusive goal is an elusive one.

“I don't know if we'll ever be ‘there’. Our communities, our demographics are constantly changing. It's about listening and understanding the context of where they've come from. It's working through a whole range of things other than just the easy bits of talking about the learner.”

Justine Henderson pictured here with tamariki, says inclusive practices are central to learning at Newtown School.

Learning never stops

The Teaching Council believes it is important to have a systematic approach to building capability. Inclusive practice should flow through the standards for teachers, the initial teacher education (ITE) requirements, and across all work programmes.

The new ITE requirements ensure providers develop authentic partnerships with, for example, disability groups and advocates, which will strengthen inclusive education in programme development. The partnerships which ITE providers nurture provide some experiences for students to connect with the community they will teach in and those with a lived experience of going through the New Zealand education system with a disability.

“This means trainee teachers are being taught how to design their classes based on an understanding of each learner’s strengths, interests, needs, identities, languages, and cultures,” says Associate Education Minister Jan Tinetti.

“These graduates contribute to our combined learning support practitioner workforce, including resource teachers and Ministry-employed specialists, which has now grown in number to nearly 2000.”

Around 350 specialist teachers each year now receive study awards to attend a refreshed Massey University postgraduate course with new core content relating to autism and neurodivergence woven through all endorsements of the programme.

Professional learning should be ongoing, says the Minister. “I think it needs to be an integral part of what we do to develop our educators because these young people make up a huge percentage of our schooling population.

Leadership is a big part of it too, she says. “What is it that we need to support our leaders to be able to lead in this space? And that's about supporting leadership, supporting our educators through many resources, not just investing in the physical resource, but also the professional development that goes alongside that as well.”