Kia ora

I hope that this message finds you warm and dry, particularly after the weather we have been having of late! Term 3 is well underway and it has been a busy start to the term with a number of projects underway.

Last week, the culmination of 2 years of fundraising by the students leaders saw the installation of two concrete table tennis tables. The table tennis tables will provide more opportunity for students to be active during interval and lunchtime for years to come. Well done to everyone involved in this project!

On Wednesday, the first in a series of rugby skills workshops was designed and facilitated by Year 13 student Hunter Baker. Hunter is currently a member of the Selwyn Schools 1st XV team and was keen to pass on some of the skills he has learned across the years as a rugby player to other students. We have been supported by iSport Foundation who provided sports equipment which is being used in the workshops. iSport Foundation was established by ex-Ellesmere College student Dan Carter (and Richie McCaw) to ensure that all young people an engage in physical activity despite the circumstances they may come from. Well done Hunter (and our Director of International Students Zodie Bonnett) for getting this project up and running!

Student Social Events

The Student Social Committee has been working away in the background organising the Senior Formal for Year 11-13 students and the Junior Semi-Formal for Year 9 & 10 students while the Student Council is organising a Year 7 & 8 disco. More information about all of these events will be released in the coming weeks.

It is fantastic to see our students take on formal and informal leadership roles in order to provide opportunities for their peers.

Welcome back Urawa Minami!

For the first time since 2019 we have been able to welcome students from our sister school Urawa Minami Senior High School in Saitama, Tokyo. Having students visit from Urawa Minami post-Covid certainly helps make things feel like "back to normal". It has also been a very busy few weeks for our International Students Department with students arriving from Japan and Thailand. All of the students were welcomed to the College at a Mihi Whakatau earlier this week.

We also had a visit from Shotoku Gakuen Junior High School from Tokyo this week who enjoyed the opportunity to experience a kiwi school for a day!

Our International Student Department has grown from strength-to-strength under the guidance of our Director of International Students, Zodie Bonnett, and we have recently had a very popular Japanese Youtube channel at school doing some recording, so watch this space! Next year our school will be at it's most ethnically diverse with international students from Brazil, Argentina, Japan, Thailand and Vietnam already booked in! We are in need of more homestays so if you are interested in hosting an international student please make contact with our amazing Homestay Coordinator Noelia Gonzalez (homestaycoordinator@ellesmere.school.nz).

Junior Cross Country

The junior cross country took place last Friday. Some perfect conditions for the event, before the rain hit! Well done to staff and students involved.

Senior Academic Achievement

It is the term when the pressure around academic achievement starts to mount as the end of the school year and external examinations come in sight. Our Year 12 and 13 students will come under increasing pressure as the number of assessments and deadlines increase, along with preparation for external exams. It is vitally important that students are at school EVERYDAY as there is a direct correlation between attendance at school and achievement, yet traditionally we have seen a major decrease in attendance by Year 12 and 13 students during term 3. Year 12 and 13 students should be spending several hours every evening working on assignments and revising in preparation for exams. This work cannot and should not be left to the last minute. Students need to plan out their work and by now should have a study plan in place if they hope to achieve their academic goals. It is also important that students are looking after themselves and putting all of the work we have done around well-being and Te Whare Mauri Ora into practice.

Attendance

It is important that all students are attending school everyday and are only away from school for justifiable reasons e.g. sick, medical appointments etc. As a school, our attendance is around 85% on a daily basis and our attendance rates higher than the national average. However, we are being placed under major pressure by the Ministry of Education and the Government to increase our attendance rates further. It is important that parents/caregivers are contacting the College when their child is going to be away and follow this up with a note to be given to the Hapori teacher. From Monday, parents/guardians will receive an automated email with a summary of their child's attendance from the previous week. If there are issues in regards to attendance which need to be resolved, please contact your child's Hapori teacher by email in the first instance. The email addresses of all staff can be found on the bottom of the "Our People" page on our website. Next Tuesday's Year 7-11 Parent-Student-Hapori Teacher meetings are an ideal opportunity to discuss attendance.

Yr 7-11 PST Conferences

If you are the parent/caregiver of a student in Year 7-11 have you made a booking for you and your child to meet with their Hapori teacher on Tuesday? This is an ideal opportunity to connect with the critical adult in your child's school life and who should be your first port-of-call if there are any issues needing to be resolved. We strongly encourage all parents/caregivers to make a booking.

Buildings

We are still waiting for information/feedback from the Ministry of Education in regards to the timelines around our redevelopment, so there is not much for me to report to you with regards to this. Over the holidays we did start two significant work projects on our current buildings, one project being initiated by the Ministry of Education (mostly around water-tightness of buildings) and another project by the Board of Trustees. The project initiated by the Board was based on feedback from students on what they would like to see happen at the College. Despite progress being slower than I would have liked due to shortage of contractors etc., we are making some headway. This will see brighter more colourful corridors for students, relocation of the Kaitiaki to another space in the College making them more accessible to students, students working with graffiti artists on murals while there is also a Connected Learning Module "Say no to beige" with students specifically working on projects to enhance our school environment. Lots happening so watch this space!

Staffing

As you will be well aware, we are in the midst of a national teacher supply crisis. We have worked hard to ensure that we can find the best teachers we can to teach our young people. I am very happy to report that we are currently fully-staffed, in fact we are over-staffed! A very warm welcome to:

Helen Katandawa - Yr 10 Ako/Science - Helen has recently relocated to New Zealand. She is an experienced Biology teacher having taught for a number of years in the UK. Prior to this she was a zookeeper!

Pauline van der Weilen - Junior CLMs/Food Technology - Pauline is a local having taught at Rolleston College for a number of years. She has joined us for terms 3 & 4 while on refreshment leave and we look forward to the varied skillset to brings to the role.

Celeste van Oudtshoorn - Yr 7 Ako/CLMs - Celeste has recently relocated to New Zealand from South Africa. She is a highly experienced teacher with over a decade and a half teaching in high schools. Her area of expertise is in Business, Economics and Mathematics and has taken on a new challenge of Year 7!

Paul McCarthy - Yr 10 Ako/English - Paul is a local who is the last piece in the staffing jigsaw puzzle! He joins our teaching team from Monday of next week. Most recently he has been the Director of International Students at Christ's College.

Sarah Anderson - Careers/Pastoral/PLD - we welcome back staff member Sarah Anderson for the rest of Term 3. Sarah will be working as Careers Advisor for 4 hours per week and will spend 8 hours a week supporting the Kaitiaki by triaging low level classroom issues and any crisis which may occur. Sarah is also going to be trained in the collection of teacher-student classroom interaction data and will, alongside myself and Assistant Principal Tanya Prout, be spending time observing all staff during Term 3. The data collected will help inform a long-term professional learning and development project which will commence next year.

It is an extremely busy time of the year and added to this is planning for 2024, particularly in relation to staffing and timetabling for next year. I will say that it has been a much more settled start to the term and it has been nice to be able to focus on teaching and learning, rather than on dealing with ongoing industrial action, which was unsettling for everyone. I have enjoyed getting into classes which are calm, focused and productive. A great start to term 3!

Ngā mihi

Ronan Bass

Tumuaki/Principal

Shout out to Paige Robertson