Orere Primary School is small rural school nestled in the hills near Kawakawa Bay, just outside of Auckland. It serves a diverse community of farmers, retirees, and lifestyle residents. Its makeup is just as diverse, with over half of its 35 pupils being of Maori or Pasifika students. PR1ME has been in the school for just over a year, and the results have been nothing short of compelling.
Kerry Forse started her role as a teaching principal in Term One of 2017. Having come from a school successfully using PR1ME, she quickly set about implementing it at Orere Primary. She knew from her previous school that with PR1ME, she could have confidence that her teachers were well resourced, well prepared, and had the structure and support to teach across many levels. “It was an investment for a small school like ours, but changes needed to be made, and what we spent in dollars we saved in time…we quickly started turning our maths results around”
And turn around PR1ME did. In the first two terms of PR1ME, they saw five of their students who were below and well below shift to at National Standard, a 15% shift. Across the school, their PAT and e-asTTle changes were even more significant, with some students shifting whole curriculum levels. Kerry explained that this was due to PR1ME’s focus on problem solving, “The children are more exposed to problem solving questions in PR1ME, and they are given the tools to comprehend and solve them better. Their mathematical literacy has improved significantly since we started.”
Kerry is a teaching principal, and spends two thirds of the day in the classroom. The clarity of instruction that is given in the prime course books allows a flexibility that traditional maths programmes lack. “PR1ME is so useful to a school like ours because if something were to go wrong; such as someone being sick, or I am called out to a meeting, or these days half a hill coming down over the road…any one of us can walk into any classroom and continue on from yesterday’s maths learning without disruption.”
Kerry has been particularly impressed with how useful PR1ME has been for her high needs learners. She explained that her volunteers and teacher aides could assist these students in a one on one setting because of how easy the books are to follow. “When our high needs learners require a little more assistance, our helpers can pick up the course books and reinforce those concepts in the same way that the teacher would be, it is very empowering for the learner and the helper,”
“We also find integrating maths into other learning areas much easier with PR1ME as well” Kerry continued. “The learning progressions are clear and easy to follow, and we can see how the number and strand concepts are interwoven. It is a blast when we can build our rich tasks to use those concepts in our country school environment.”
