Pastoral System
Geraldine High School places significant emphasis on the pastoral care of all students, encompassing aspects of personal, emotional, social and behavioural development.
Personnel involved in the Geraldine High School pastoral system include:
- Vertical Form Teacher
- Year Level Dean
- Guidance Counsellor – Mr Mark Hayward This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
- Social Worker / Attendance Officer – Mrs Anne Rawson This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
- Chaplain – Mrs Rachele Morris
- Careers Advisor – Mrs Desiree McCaskill This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
- Senior Leadership Team
- Class teachers
Together, all school personnel provide a comprehensive support service for students and their families where appropriate.
Vertical Form
The care network begins with the vertical form teacher. Each student belongs to a vertical form group which meets for a short time each day, to touch base with the vertical form teacher and the other students in this small group. Everyone is looking out for each other in this daily meeting.
The vertical form teachers are fully supported by the year level deans and the senior leadership team. The deans move with their year level and, like the vertical form teacher, get to know the individuals in their year group very well over the years. The deans may function in an advisory, mentoring, counselling or disciplinary role depending on the needs of the individual. Students may be referred by the form or subject teachers or may self-refer if they have an issue that requires support or advice.
Other Services
Other services provided within the pastoral system include peer tutoring, peer mediation, personal mentoring, individual course planning and careers counselling, individual personal counselling, group counselling or mediation, and also specialist help from outside agencies if required.
Effective communication is key to the overall effectiveness of our pastoral care system, and staff ensure that students, teachers and parents are kept fully informed of issues as they arise. The school also welcomes input from parents and acknowledges the importance of open transparent dialogue if the best interests of students are to be addressed.
DEAR (Drop Everything And Read)
Rationale:
- to give all students exposure to written texts
- to practise reading skills
- to increase student vocabulary – research suggests 15-20 minutes daily reading will increase vocabulary by several hundred words a year
- to improve reading skills in all curriculum areas
- to provide an opportunity for subject reading beyond the classroom.
Buddy Reading
This programme aligns a Year 7 or 8 reader with a senior student. The goal is to increase the reading mileage and skills completed by the junior student. The junior students placed in the programme can all read but in many cases have lost the love of reading. Placing them with a senior enables them to enjoy books and to share their experiences on a one-to-one basis, which improves their confidence in reading and builds social skills.
The senior students are tutored in the ‘Three P’ system. This involves them in pausing rather than giving the reader a word, prompting to help them discover the word and then praise when they succeed. This system has been used successfully with under-achieving readers for some years in Auckland, and our experience is also one of success. Most of the readers gain more than one year, and some gain two years, where the programme is supported by their classroom teacher and caregivers.
We also ask the seniors to spend time asking the student questions about their reading as testing shows a general weakness in ‘retell,’ which is a vital research and study skill.
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