It’s been a busy start to the year for the Future Pathways faculty.

Our longtime Head of Future Pathways, Mikaere Smith, has taken a year off to study full-time Te Tohu Paetahi - full immersion Te Reo Māori - at the University of Waikato’s Tauranga campus.

In his place, we welcome Andy Howells who was Aquinas' Learning Support Coordinator before taking on the Head of Future Pathways role. Andy has a teaching background and comes to the position with a wealth of knowledge from an educational and employer perspective, having worked for Priority One and the University of Waikato in previous jobs.

This year, we have renamed our Barista course to the Service Sector Skills Programme. This renaming will move the perception away from it being solely about making coffee and more about gaining valuable life skills that will help students obtain a part-time job, or promotion at their current workplace. These skills include customer service, money handling, time management, stock management, working in a team and workplace First Aid. All are skills that can be transferred to any job in the service sector.

Our first group of Service Sector Skills students are well underway and are working in teams on their rostered shift in the coffee cart. Apart from the Barista and First Aid course, each student must also complete three unit standards, and the equivalent of five to 20 days of work experience in the coffee cart making coffee and serving customers, to complete the programme.

We’ll recognise our first team at Assembly early in Term 2, and our second group of students will start their programme in mid-May.

Early in the term, we took the entire group of Year 12’s to the RYDA Driver Education workshop. This workshop is supported by our local Rotary clubs - both financially and with manpower on the day.

Its purpose is to give young drivers the tools and insight into road safety - to identify crash factors, appreciate personal risk, develop personal strategies and approach driving as a social responsibility.

We feel that attending this workshop, alongside doing a Defensive Driving course when they’re eligible, will stand all of our rangatahi in good stead for becoming active citizens who are positive, socially connected road users.

We’ve had our first round of University visits over the past couple of weeks. This has been a good introduction to tertiary study for our senior students. It’s been great to see a number of Year 12’s attend these sessions to start thinking about what they might like to do and where they might want to study when they leave school.

We have a record 30 senior students taking part in the Unistart programme. Unistart allows Year 13 students (who have met the academic eligibility criteria) to enrol in a university paper while still at school. The papers students have enrolled in are Computer Science, Forensic Criminology, Health, Leadership, Mathematics, Media & Society, News & Journalism, Psychology, Real Estate & Sports Coaching. We look forward to sharing their success later in the year.

Next term we have numerous presentations, courses and workshops planned and will promote them closer to the time. One worth an early mention is the Young Workers Resource Centre which will present to Year 12s about their rights as young workers entering (or currently in) the workforce. This is a great interactive workshop and an extremely valuable resource for you, or any young person, having difficulties in their current job.

Additionally, we’ll be taking a group of Year 13s to visit the University of Waikato’s Hamilton Campus for its Open Day in May. We will also take Year 10 and 12 students to the CANVAS Careers Expo in August. This could be useful for those students struggling to select their subjects for next year.

In the meantime, if you or your child have any questions about subject choices and Future Pathways, please feel free to contact us or make an appointment to stop by.

Andrew Howells – ahowells@aquinas.school.nz

Natasha Kahle – nkahle@aquinas.school.nz