Health Project - Overview

Several initiatives at a national government and local government level have provided the strategic emphasis that schools welcome to support them in their endeavours to raise student achievement and provide the platforms for students so that they transition successfully to the workforce.

In October 2004 Garry Moore outlined a city guarantee to the youth of Christchurch to have young people either in work or in training, and he noted that to do this they would need certain levels of literacy and numeracy.

The 2005 Government release of the national Working and Growing Together initiative with targeted funding of $43 million on reading and writing programmes and $12 million on maths initiatives mentioned the strength of the Christchurch community and the Prime Minister specifically praised the local community forums their hard work and communication with central government.

The LANE (Literacy And Numeracy Empowerment) Project had its genesis from the above strategic visions and was started in 2005 as an initiative of Linwood College with financial and strategic support from the Wayne Francis Charitable Trust. The initial aim of the pilot project was to scope the variables affecting youth literacy and numeracy, and to investigate strategies to facilitate improvements.

Linwood College is a state co-educational secondary school in Christchurch, catering for approximately 950 students from diverse backgrounds. Students at Year 9 enter with reading ages ranging from 7/8 to 16 and junior classes are streamed to cater for the vast range of abilities.

The literature search carried out in 2005 by Alan Parris and the LANE Project team at Linwood College identified the need to remove significant barriers to learning such as deficits in physical and mental health before pedagogical solutions could be fully effective. This resulted in a recommendation to the Wayne Francis Charitable Trust to provide a medical assessment of all the Year 9 and Year 10 students at Linwood College, examining ears, eyes, and teeth; and assessing students' aerobic fitness and their mental health.

This gave the project an initial focus on the health and wellbeing of these children and the impact of the intervention on three groups of students: those with the medical treatment only, those with targeted literacy intervention only, and those who had both medical treatment and a targeted literacy programme as well.