As you will know it is now school holidays for the next two weeks. We want all teachers and students to take a ‘brain break’ from teaching and learning so that we can all return feeling refreshed on Wednesday 15 April.

Like many other schools, our plan for dealing with learning during this unprecedented time is to use Teams, which is a Microsoft Office 365 tool. Some teachers have been using parts of Teams to deliver their programmes for a while now, but our current situation offers an opportunity to more fully utilise the tools of remote learning that Teams offers. We will be sending an update towards the end of next week with details of how to access and use Teams, which will be helpful for those students who are not yet familiar with it.

We realise that some students may be feeling a bit anxious about how the Covid-19 situation might affect planned assessments. Please rest assured that teachers will be working to ensure that students are not disadvantaged because of the situation and that NZQA are putting processes in place to deal with potential issues for students. I will include more detail about these processes in the update at the end of next week.