EQUITY REFERALS PROCESS
STAFF REFERALS
Staff are at the 'coal face' and are the eyes, ears and limbs of the equity project. They interact and see students and families everyday.
Before being able to use these guidelines staff need to have been inducted into PB4L and had professional development on social Supports and Health Supports as well as any of the relevant school documentation.
This is the referral system for the staff to follow if a need for equity arises within the school.
As part of the Equity Project the Tech Futures Lab project a key part of the process was looking at how the Equity Team could collate and track individual students. We tried the following platforms and had the following outcomes.
Iteration 1 - Google Document
Positives
Could be accessible anywhere and any place
Negatives
Iteration 2 - Google Sheet
Positives
Could be accessible anywhere and any place
Negatives
Iteration 3 - Trello
Positives
-
Could be accessible anywhere and any place
Negatives
Iteration 4 - Assembly - SMS
Positives
-
Could be accessible anywhere and any place
Negatives
Iteration 5 - Etap - SMS
Positives
-
Could be accessible anywhere and any place
Negatives
An interesting development during the development phase of our collation of information trial and review process was the announcement of learning support coordinators to identify learning support needs of students within school and then coordinate experts to support the individual trial. This would be overseen in partnership with the Ministry of Education. Unfortunately these roles were distributed to Kahui Ako (Communities of Schools) rather than individual schools. On the face of the announcement it is a really exciting move and it is understandable to have and use the resource over a number of schools. The issue we face is that schools in high need demand their own learning support coordinator. The Ministry of Education, more so politicians, will and have said that the resource should go some way to support the schools with the most need within a Kahui Ako.
In the wash-up of allocation Mayfair School, with a high need of support missed out as their was no allocation to the schools Kahui Ako.
A promising development out of the learning support coordinators was the announcement of Te Rito (Student Information Sharing - formerly known as SISI)
"Te Rito is intended to save schools and teachers time in chasing down critical learner information from a student’s previous school." (MOE, 2019). In 2020 Ricardo Fox as appointed Co Lead of the Whirinaki Kahui Ako and in this role had further discussion with the Ministry of Education experts who said that "Te Rito would extract data from a school student management systems (SMS)" and that "eventually all schools would have a mandated SMS to use" (MOE, 2020)
Unfortunately this register still sits at a Kahui Ako level; and not an individual level and as the needs of individual learners is so vast in an individual school of 250 students, the number of individual learner needs at 3000 plus students would be endless. I do agree that the roll out of professional development across a Kahui Ako would be more clinical than getting into every school individually. The danger is missing the children who have acute learning needs or supports that require more specialist intervention or care, particularly those that have Mind Health concerns, keeping in mind that as a country we have a very high suicide rate, particular in teenagers. Students not long out of primary school.
Through all the announcement and development of Te Rito, the Equity Team were excited that the choice of collation of information for individual students was using our school SMS.
EQUITY TEAM PROCESSING OF REFERALS
