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From the Principal's Desk

Mr Scott Thelning —

Kia ora ki te whanau o te Cathedral Grammar School.

The day has sadly arrived. After sixteen years of being the heart and soul of our school, Mrs Linda Marsh has unfortunately announced she will be retiring at the end of this year. As I am sure you will all agree, Linda has earned and deserves a fantastic retirement and, while we are sad about her decision, we understand and respect it and wish her all the very best for her future. We will farewell Linda in a variety of ways next term and will inform you of how you can participate as soon as we can.

It is true what is said about time flying by as you get older. I recently said goodbye to my mid-forties, and cannot believe we are about to say goodbye to Term III!

In a busy school such as ours, with a vast array of activities taking place each and every day, it is important to stop and take stock of all of the wonderful opportunities, events, efforts and achievements right across our school community. Grammar Notes and our Facebook page are consistently highlighting the fun, effort, skills and talents enjoyed and displayed by our fantastic pupils. Thank you to the many of you who have supported and contributed towards this. We value your willingness to partner with us as we continue to build upon and strengthen our school community culture.

WOW! WAMM! Congratulations to Y7&8 pupils for a truly wonderful Words, Art, Music & Movement evening at the Cathedral on Friday. This was my first WAMM and I thoroughly enjoyed seeing a variety of skills and talents put together in the one evening, pupil input into the planning and running of the event and an authentic representation of learning and who we are as a school. I was especially impressed with the way different cultures were infused into the evening – just stunning! We must aim to have our school on the stage at Horncastle Arena as a part of the Cultural Festival in 2018! Well done to all pupils, staff and parents involved.

Thank you to the approximately 100 of you who were able to attend our parent information evening two weeks ago and for the positive feedback received. It was wonderful to see this number of you come along and hear the key messages about our vision for the next ten years and associated three-year strategy. Significant work over the past twelve months has brought us to this point and it was great to be able to articulate this to you as a community. It is critical that our pupils, staff, parents and wider community clearly understand who are, what we stand for, where we are going and how we are going to get there. This provides clarity, certainty and a strong framework for us to set about achieving our aspirational goals.

The purpose of the presentation was to provide you with a high-level overview of the direction, along with our Anglican character, core values and goals that underpin and drive this. There is, of course, much work that has begun and will continue across multiple work streams at a detail level, and as a part of this there will be opportunities for you to engage with the process and content at appropriate times along the way. The first of these will be next term around the use of technology as a part of learning and teaching, and an update from our curriculum development team.

Our themes of every child, every day; nurturing, knowing and growing, and wellbeing and resilience were very well supported on the night by the two guest speakers – Dr Lucy Hone and John Quinn. We have received extremely positive feedback about these two, their message and the way they delivered it. The balance of the research and science behind their work through to the raw nature of what Lucy has been through as a mother, and the school and family perspective that John brought, was a good combination. As a part of our commitment to this aspect of our vision, our staff will be attending a professional development half-day at Christ’s College with Mathew White, Director of Wellbeing and Positive Education at St Peter’s College in Adelaide in these next school holidays.

For those of you who were unable to attend the information evening, I will repeat my presentation in the school hall this Friday at 8:45am. We will also be working with our marketing partners, Plato Creative, to develop some simple but clear graphics to illustrate our vision and strategy.

In order for us to be successful in realising our aspirational goals, we need our whole school community (board, staff, parents and pupils) aligning with and collaboratively supporting the vision. We have a great school with a proud history and an exciting future.

I look forward to working with you to make it happen.

Have a fantastic four weeks.

Nga mihi,

Scott Thelning