Term 2 2022 Review Summary
We’re now halfway through our review of the hefty Health, Safety, and Welfare section of SchoolDocs. Building on last term’s improvements, we’ve continued to strengthen the legislative framework of this section. In particular, we reference the Health and Safety at Work Act 2015 and Education and Training Act 2020 as these underpin a lot of the policy. We aim to reflect this legislation in a way that is accessible to the whole school community. We’ve combined your feedback with our own deep dive into the research to develop the upcoming changes for the term.
In term 2 the focus was on Healthcare and Behaviour Management. These sections contain a lot of information specific to each school. The process of reviewing the actions in Upcoming Changes is a great opportunity to get your policies up to date and ensure your school-specific information is current and accurate.
Healthcare
Over 30 topics made up our review of the Healthcare section. Within this section are smaller topic groups that we’ve updated as a set to improve their overall clarity. This section covers first aid, medicines, injuries and illnesses, health conditions, and infectious diseases. These updates clarify and specify the preventative measures, immediate actions, and follow-up processes that schools are responsible for.
We’ve updated the Reporting and Recording Accidents and Incidents topic and added a new topic for Communicating about Injuries and Illness to clarify reporting and notification protocols for health matters.
The Health Conditions section covers the main health issues that arise for schools. Schools engaged enthusiastically with the Allergies, Asthma, Diabetes, Head Lice, and Infectious Diseases topics, and showed a strong commitment to supporting individuals and the wider school community. As a result, we’ve strengthened preventative and response measures in these topics. References in this section have been updated to link to the most recent guidance from health authorities.
Feedback on Infectious Diseases included substantial comment about COVID-19 and the challenges schools and their communities have been facing. We appreciate hearing how schools have honed their processes to keep pace with the changing health environment. While our COVID-19 Information and Procedures topic provides information specific to COVID-19, the Infectious Diseases topics are designed to cover a range of scenarios and provide guidance for protecting both individuals and schools as a whole.
Behaviour Management
This section covers how schools approach behaviour management, including values, expectations, and consequences. Unsurprisingly, we received plenty of feedback for these topics. Updates we’ve made allow schools to include school-specific information while also reinforcing the broad conduct requirements for students, staff, and the school community.
Our updates to the main Behaviour Management topic reflect feedback from schools that focused on strategies to recognise and manage challenging behaviour. We’ve now included wording about de-escalation and provided space for schools to describe the strategies they use.
The Surrender and Retention section has been made easier to read and puts greater focus on the rights of both the school and the student. Following your feedback, we've strengthened the wording for Personal Digital Devices to address the challenges presented by technology in a school setting.
For Physical Restraint, we’ve updated this topic in line with the new rules and guidelines currently being drafted by the Ministry of Education but we may need to make further tweaks when the guidelines are released.
The final topic in the Behaviour Management section covers Stand-down, Suspension, and Exclusion. We've made extensive changes to this policy to clarify the rights and responsibilities of everyone involved.
Thank you
We’d like to thank you for your contributions to the term 2 review. We hope that you share our excitement at being able to make thorough updates to our content that better reflect the needs of schools.
