He Kākano Communique17 -Tuesday1November2011

In this communiqué we cover:

  1. Learnings from different schools:
  2. Working through the He Kākano Process in an established school (Yvonne Browning, Principal, SouthlandGirlsHigh School)
  3. Working through the He Kākano Process in a new school (Karyn Gray, PrincipalTeKarakaAreaSchool)
  4. National Advisory Group Minutes – Summary Points – some good learnings
  5. He Kākano Indicators framework – coming soon
  6. Developing Your He Kākano Implementation Plan
  7. Wānanga Presentations – send them in
  8. Dates for Wānanga 4 and 5 in 2012 – do they suit?

One of the most important insights about the need to bring about deep change in others has to do with where deep change actually starts."

— Robert E. Quinn

  1. Learnings from different schools:

Working Through the He Kākano Process in an Established School - SouthlandGirlsHigh School (Principal – Yvonne Browning)

  1. SouthlandGirlsHigh School – 1149 students, 196 (17%) Māori, Decile 5
  1. Principal Yvonne Browning has developed a poster or canvas with her team that reflects the He Kākano journey to date in her school. It is a ‘work in progress’ that nevertheless reflects every element of the He Kākano story in some way – a kind of ‘short hand’ reminder for the staff and anyone else to look at and consider. She hopes to complete the next version by the end of Term 1, 2012.
  1. At first glance, three things stand out on the canvas – the patches of red SGHS uniform at the top and the unique red shoes worn by the SGHS girls at the bottom (red is, of course, symbolic in a number of cultures for good luck and success, and this theme is echoed in the rest of the canvas detail). The splash of colour is ‘interrupted’ by key words under a central magnifying glass and the hand drawn poutama and koru designs around it,which provide a counterpoint to the printed formalised graphs (in red and blue) and printed phrases that make up the rest of the poster. Closer scrutiny of the canvas reveals that ALL the words have portent – including the hand written ones.
  1. Yvonne said her He Kākano journey began in November 2010, when she attended the first wānanga at Puketeraki. After that, she said, ‘We put an He Kākano lens on everything we did’. The school leaders have developed a ‘grid’ for curriculum and leadership development to help them map what needs to be done and by whom. They like the idea of the poutama on their canvas reflecting growth because ‘it is culturally more respectful’. As we have seen at the wānanga, the poutama design also reminds us of the importance of taking small steps to attain our goals and to provide for times to stop and celebrate progress each step of the way.
  1. When you look carefully at the poutama on the SGHS canvas you see three different streams of ideas related to He Kākano on each step:
  • Student voice...Staff voice...Whānau voice...Challenge beliefs
  • Enquire...leaders and beliefs...Challenge the discourse...Review
  • Change beliefs through data

These three sets of steps identify what is really important for the leaders to focus on as they build their HK programme.

  1. Yvonne believes that quality relationships count. She wants to make relationships explicit – so people are very clear about what to expect of each other and from each other. They also have a philosophy that says: ‘Talk is the work. Talk does the work. Talk becomes the work.’ This statement reflects the importance that Yvonne places on talking through all elements of the programme, so that there is absolute clarity and understanding by all and so that critical discourse leads to sound action.
  1. After wānanga 2 the school leaders asked themselves the question: Why does Māori student achievement look so good?‘However, after looking long and hard at AREA data, they turned their ‘critical talk’ focus onto their Māori girls’ retention rates. From the point of view of the Project team, it’s often not easy to get the data focus right until there has been a close examination of data.
  1. The senior leadership team is now creating spread across HoDs, driven by the desire to make Māori achievement data explicit to all. To help that happen, the He Kākano team were invited to help plan and facilitate a school-basedstaff professional development day.Encouraged by their Manutaki John Tait and Raewin Tipene-Clark, the SLT have ‘infiltrated’ He Kākano into their performance management processes.
  1. While trying to get more whānau involved, they are also creating breadth and depth in their school leadership, requiring their Year Level Coordinators to look after the students’ social, emotional, physical and academic wellbeing. The school doesn’t have Deans because the word ‘Dean’ is often associated with the more negative elements related to disciplinary matters.
  1. The senior leadership team meets off site every Thursday to discuss and progress He Kākano. The Senior Leadership Team and Heads of department have already had a Hui with Hine and their Manutaki Raewin and John on Te Rau Aroha marae at the Bluff. The staff loved it – and now see themselves as agents of change. Our experience to date with He Kākano schools shows that when such hui are well planned and delivered, they can be powerful tools for creating agentic changes and re-positioning.
  1. The school holds ‘Vision Mondays’, which are held entirely for professional development matters. The administration emails repeat messages - to uncover the learning and allowing understanding to take place, from the SLT to the BoT and to the Staff and the HoDs. The Year Level Coordinators also have a specific He Kākano focus. Again, the He Kākano project team has seen other good examples from schools about how important it is to find ways to ‘embed’ key messages and to maintain focus.
  1. One positive by-product of He Kākano programme has been all the Secondary schools in town connecting with the local Runaka, which they are currently establishing a Memorandum of Understanding with. There is a suggestion that all secondary schools in Invercargill could meet some time in the future hui to discuss progress.
  1. Yvonne said: ‘I am really enjoying the challenge (of He Kākano). There was a hard point (when we did not seem to be getting anywhere), but the hui we had with HoDs has enabled us to ‘spread’ the key ideas. What we are doing now is planning and trying to get congruence in what we do. Changing peoples’ cultural location has helped the process.’

Learnings from different schools:

Working Through the He Kākano Process in a New School - Te KarakaAreaSchool(Principal – Karyn Gray)

  1. Te Karaka Area School) – 225 students, 199 Māori (98%), decile – not stated)
  1. As a brand new school Principal Karyn Gray believes there are real benefits in starting from scratch. She has not as yet developed an identifiable school ‘culture’ but she has made a strategic decision to focus on building relationships – starting with everyone knowing everyone else by name – and to also focus on student-centred learning. Both of these strategic goals link to the school’s He Kākano goal, which is to raise the engagement levels of the school’s Years 9 and 10 students. The biggest challenge, she says, is to build positive learning-focussed relationships with students. Teachers do know their students, and their whānau also know the teachers.
  1. Karyn says: ‘With only a 100 students from Years 7-13, you can’t treat the students as if they are in a mini version of a large school.’ This is supported by the He Kākano ‘one size fits one’ approach, where our support needs to be tailored to the kind of programme that Karen has in mind.

Creating Structures to fit the Goals

  1. The raising of achievement levels has begun with the focus on classroom relationships and the organisation of the curriculum areasto specifically address low achievement levels. Karyn started by organising how the teachers can learn different ways of teaching and this has led to infrastructural changes that fit the school’s main foci. These structural changes include:
  • The school is divided into five Whānau Teams of about 40 students each , that include students from Years 1-13. They meet for twenty minutes before lunch. The time is spent differently by each whānau group (according to the students’ and teachers’ interests such as co-operative games, computers or sports). Teachers have to actively plan for these classes, but a core purpose is to develop and strengthen school wide relationships
  • Meetings are held for Year Level groups once a week
  • Students from Years 7-10 have home rooms – these rooms are ‘their space’ where 80% of the learning happens. Each home room has 1-2 teachers able to teach across all subject areas. As expected in an area school, teachers need to be multi-functional and have many of the best pedagogical characteristics of our best primary trained teachers, while also having more than one special interest subject skills.
  • Students in Years 11-13 attend multi-level integrated classes, with teachers covering at least two learning areas each.
  • The school has 100 minute periods x 4 days per week. On the fifth day students attend an Inspire programme, which is a whole day programmethat provides them with active real-life learning opportunities, including kayaking, tramping and even French. Technology includes ICT projects.
  • There are three main learning areas with eight week modules – in other words, teachers have their classes for eight weeks at a time. At the end of each eight week modulethe school has a ‘Learning Celebration Week’, which is spent by students self-evaluating their own progress, preparing materials for presentation and teachers writing their evaluations of the students. The evaluations and presentations are shared with the other classes.
  • Parents are invited into the school for the students to present their learning. (Note that at the end of module 1, four of the students’ whānau came into the school. By the end of module 3, ninety attended).
  • The senior secondary students also have Advisory teachers who look after about eight students each, who students go to for advice on a range of issues such as finding out where they are up to in their learning or negotiating credits for NCEA
  • In sum, a teacher may be a Whānau Group teacher, an Advisory teacher and a classroom subject teacher.
  1. Karen believes that engagement is very important – Karyn wants to raise attendance levels from 65% to 80% this year.
  1. He Kākano National Advisory Group Minutes
  1. Full Minutes of the HKNAG meeting held in Wellington on 10 October 2011 are now available on the web site.
  1. The two learnings (above) come from the presentations made by the two Principals at that meeting. A summary of the Minutes should reach you over the next day or so. If you want to see the detail, you will need to look at the Full Minutes.
  1. The two learnings are preceded by a summary discussion of different models schools are using to create ‘shift’ (that is, how schools are tackling ‘spread’ of the He Kākano programme).
  1. In the full Minutes there is also an interesting discussion around the topic ‘What do we mean by ‘engagement’? ‘ This question was raised by Malcolm Cox (Raglan Area School), because schools are developing goals from their AREA data, without necessarily thinking through clearly how each data set is linked, and ‘engagement’ is one of those terms that we all know and use, but actually have some quite different ideas about.
  1. Malcolm Cox also describes an excellent model for engaging with whānau that he is currently trialling in his school and writing up. It’s clever, innovative and could work anywhere, because like Karyn Gray’s curriculum delivery model, it is well thought through.
  1. Indicators Self Review Framework
  1. Your HKNAG members were presented with a copy of these to read and comment on several months ago. At the wānanga I signalled that we were developing the He Kākano Indicators with the Ministry of Education, to show ‘shift’, to show how the He Kākano programme impacts on leaders across a range of different fronts. Even though we take a ‘one size fits one’ approach, the self review framework provides leaders with a tool to assess how well they are doing over time, and these can then become fertile ground for ongoing discussion or ‘critical discourse’. The framework has four parts to it, but it works in an iterative way (more like a spiral than a circle), because while each part focuses on different elements of leadership, the spread of ‘leadership ‘grows ever wider from SLT to middle leaders to teachers and students to communities. The four parts to the Indicators Self Review framework are:
  • Positioning/Re-positioning

These Indicators focus on the role of (school) leaders as culturally located change agents who are able to share responsibilities for change (distributive leadership) and create optimal conditions for Māori students to succeed as Māori

  • Enquiring

These Indicators focus on leaders making optimal use of data to set (personal and school) goals that value Māori students’ and the Māori community’s identity, language and culture

  • Co-constructing and reconstructing

These Indicators focus on leaders as coaches and planners who prioritise resources and develop curriculum frameworks that maximise Māori students’ potential

  • Engaging

These Indicators focus on leaders as culturally responsive, relationship builders who listen to and work with their school community (staff, students and whānau) to set learning conditions that will enhance Māori students’ potential

  1. We are calling it a self review tool because that is what it is. We are asking the Manutaki to guide you through this over this term and next term, with a view to you all having seriously considered and worked your way through it by the end of the school year (preferable) if not by the end of the first term of next year. We will also use wānanga 4 to discuss it further and get ideas from you. We think it’s a tool that will initially need your Manutaki input, to discuss and assist you to fill in. We are NOT expecting you to do it all at once.
  1. Developing Your He Kākano Implementation Plan
  1. The Ministry is also asking us to work with you to ensure you have completed an He Kākano Implementation plan. We understand that schools have approached the planning element quite differently. In terms of ‘paper work’, some schools have developed separate He Kākano plans. Others have integrated their He Kākano programme into their larger planning documents. Others still have put everything under an He Kākano umbrella, because they think the GPILSEO framework helps schools to think about the sustainability and embedded-ness of all their programmes, with Māori achievement being their highest level goal. While we know there are a lot of different ‘plans’, we are asking Manutaki to work with you to ensure that, whatever they look like, they are available.
  1. Over the next term Manutaki will be talking to you about how far you have got with these plans. Again, the idea is to try to have these completed and up-to-date by mid March 2012.
  1. Wānanga Presentations
  1. Please email a copy of your wānanga presentations from the Round Tables exercise to Soli or Paul as soon as possible, so we can make them available for other schools in your region. Addresses: or
  1. Preparing for Wānanga 4 and 5 in 2012
  1. In setting the dates for Wānanga 4 and 5 for 2012 we have taken into account all known possible clashes with other key local dates that we have been able to find out at this stage of the year. There are some dates (e.g. SPANZ) that we have not been able to get information on in terms of timing for next year’s meetings. Please let us know directly or through your regional representatives if the proposed dates below will be seriously clashing with events you are aware of.

PROPOSED HE KĀKANO WĀNANGA TIMETABLE FOR 2012

Region / Wānanga 4 and 5, 2012 / Date
Otago-Southland / Venues to be confirmed / 19-20 March 2012
6-7 September 2012
Cant/West/Nels/Marl / Venues to be confirmed / 22-23 March 2012
3-4 September 2012
Well/Wai/Mana/Horo / Venues to be confirmed / 8-9 March 2012
16-17 August 2012
Tar/Wan/Man/Horo / Venues to be confirmed / 5-6 March 2012
13-14 August 2012
Auck/North Auck / Venues to be confirmed / 20-21 February 2012
30-31 July 2012
Wai/BoP / Venues to be confirmed / 23-24 February 2012
2-3 August 2012

We have asked the HK National Advisory Group for ideas about focus for Wānanga 4, and at this stage we are seeing Wānanga 4 as an opportunity to share ideas even more, including building on the three previous wānanga. We are also seeing one of the purposes of the next wānanga will be to increase ‘spread’ by engaging middle leaders more.

Planning details for the next two wānanga are under way.If you have ideas about what you would like to see included, please get back to us or contact your regional advisory group representatives

We are looking forward to seeing a number of you in our project management visits

Mauri ora,

Paora and Hine

(on behalf of Russell Bishop – currently on leave, and Mere Berryman)

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