Internal review updates

Minimising Physical Restraint

• Updated this policy to reflect changes to physical restraint rules and guidelines, including:
  • removing dates within the policy where these have already passed
  • updating wording about notifying the use of physical restraint and staff completing online learning as required within 10 weeks of starting at school.

Classroom Release Time / Timetable

• Updated to meet collective agreement requirements for 2025.

Attendance Procedures

• Added a statement about daily reporting of attendance data, as required from 2025 under the Education and Training Act 2020 and Education (School Attendance) Regulations 2024.
• Clarified where schools can add optional school-specific information about their approach to the Stepped Attendance Response (STAR).
• Updated relevant legislation and resources.

Performance Management / Review Schedule and Board Assurances

• Updated Performance Management board assurance to align with ERO Board Assurance Statement and Self-Audit Checklists.

Records Retention

• Added wording to cover following the instructions of Archives New Zealand.

Governance and Management Policy

Board Responsibilities

• Updated these topics to move sentences about delegation out of the "School management" and "Roles of the principal" sections and into the board responsibilities section of the content.

Getting to and from School Safely

Student Drivers

• Removed explanation of road safe behaviour from a dropdown under travelling to and from school.
• Retired optional Student Drivers topic for composite and secondary schools. Wording about student drivers can now be added to the Getting to and From School Safely topic.

Generative AI

• Updated this topic to replace wording about "school-owned" content with a clearer reference to intellectual property and publicly available generative AI tools.

Daily School Bus

Bus Safety, Behaviour, and Incidents

Monitoring and Auditing School Bus

(Privately Funded School Operated)

• Updated content for schools that privately fund their own daily school bus and operate this themselves. Updates include a new auditing checklist.

School Vehicles

• Updated content to add a link to the bus topics for schools that use school vehicles to run a daily school bus.

RTLB Care and Protection of Students

• Clarified wording about teachers seeking support from RTLB staff about student needs and gaining consent for individual requests for support.