Wellbeing, in this survey, is considered to be the experience of health and happiness. It includes mental and physical health, physical and emotional safety, a feeling of belonging, sense of purpose, achievement and success. Wellbeing is a broad concept and covers a range of psychological and physical abilities. As a school, we see the ongoing participation in this survey as useful to inform our teaching and learning as well as other in-school programmes. However, wellbeing has many facets. Improving students’ well-being in school requires a whole-school approach, involving the community, teachers, parents and caregivers. Presenting this data to the community allows us to collectively understand the wellbeing of our young people better.

Our working theory before NZCER collected the data was that we would see a negative wellbeing impact from Covid and we would have ‘catch-up’ work to be done as we progress past the covid restrictions. Although we have not achieved much wellbeing growth, we have sustained the levels of wellbeing throughout the covid period. This is a pleasant surprise to the team.

Our Primary Students complete a slightly different survey from our Secondary Students, therefore the data is separate. Each survey uses tailored language and vocabulary based on age. These diagrams show the wellbeing of our students across 2018, 2020 and now (2022).

Year 8 and Younger

Year 9 and above

The categories measured by the surveys are:

• Caring and collaborative school
• Respect for Culture
• Safe School
• Caring Teaching
• Caring Learning
• Home-School Partnerships
• Pro-social School Culture
• Students’ Social Strategies
• Aggressive School Culture (this is the low section of the diagram - as you would expect it to be!)

The grey line in each diagram represents 2022. You can see in the Primary School, there has been significant growth across the wellbeing categories since 2018. In the Secondary School, there has been little change in the wellbeing indicators since 2018. There has been a reduction in the wellbeing relating to Caring Teaching and Home-School Partnerships. These could be the indicators closest related to covid impact. As a school, we intend to ask further questions in Term 4 and the start of 2023 to establish our improvement needs in these areas.

Overall Primary School Aspect Report

Overall Secondary School Aspect Report

In schoolwide terms, we intend to develop further programmes to improve our services in the categories of Pro-Social School Culture and Students’ Social Strategies as these categories are lower in both Primary and Secondary students. This is more noticeably obvious in the Aspect Reports (above).

Our staff have met and analysed the data in more depth, our Board will soon consider this data. As a teaching group, we have discussed future plans, and will collaboratively create a future plan to promote higher levels of wellbeing in the target areas noted above.