I attended a Principals’ conference in Blenheim this week with an interesting list of speakers and themes. Given the events of the last 15 months, the two strongest themes were wellbeing and, not surprisingly, leadership. John Peachey addressed both of these aspects in his keynote comparing the Everest climbs of George Mallory and Andrew Irvine […]
Category: Principal’s Message
I met with a group of Wellington Principals yesterday and a representative from the New Zealand Qualifications Authority (NZQA). The meeting was about the service that NZQA provides for schools. You may or may not know that an NCEA review has been underway for some time with the intention of rolling out new standards and […]
A year ago in this message I was talking about our roll growth and the future plans that were in place to address a growing school. Since then, the Ministry has put in place four classrooms on the edge of our field to ease some of the congestion and these have been welcomed by the […]
When I became Principal in 2017, I wanted to give greater priority to Te Ao Māori – living in the Māori world. I read an interesting piece by another Principal a little while back – Perry Rush, who is the President of the New Zealand Principal’s Federation. He was writing about attending a Māori Principals’ conference […]
Kia ora koutou, We have had a lovely day at school today and the support offered by other schools, outside agencies, ex colleagues and ex students and of course, our community, has been heartening and inspiring. I say inspiring because incidents like yesterday’s are very complex. What we know is that a person felt that […]
(adapted from the Principal’s address at Senior Prizegiving – Monday 9 November) Our experiences with COVID-19 this year have potentially taught us a lot; about how we live, how we work and how we school and there are clear lessons for our leaving class and for all of us. At the end of March this […]
I write having just attended another one of our wonderful music evenings. It’s hard to describe these if you’ve never been to one. The joy of the performances is quite, dare I say in these uncertain times, infectious and the array of talent on display is quite inspiring. The song choices are interesting too. Who […]
Kia ora koutou I once again write in uncertain times. We feel slightly removed from the events in Auckland so we feel we can go about most things fairly normally but there is a heightened sense of caution as this new reality unfolds. A key word at this point for me is vigilance. We need […]
We had our open evening last Monday night and our first music evening on Wednesday night. Only a few weeks ago we felt resigned to the fact that these sorts of events wouldn’t happen this year. It’s been lovely to see the re-activation of our cultural and sporting programmes. We are very lucky that we […]
I write at the end of the first school week at level 2. The key principles of level 2 are to: reduce the risk of someone getting infected in the first place, ensure we can identify and contact anyone who becomes infected, understand that it is not business as usual. We have extensively planned for […]