Please remember that your children’s teachers will be attending a paid union meeting next Tuesday afternoon and children need to be collected at 12:30. We appreciate that this will inconvenience many of you, however teachers pay and conditions have been left behind in recent years. If your children are to continue to have high calibre, quality teachers there must be a significant improvement. It is a 5 or 6 year qualification to become a registered teacher.

Our teachers need to be freed up to teach, so every child receives the personal attention they need to learn and thrive. This requires additional staff to do the myriad of unrelated tasks your teachers are doing, including counselling and social work. We need to ensure that we have enough teachers by attracting more people to teaching, by respecting them as professionals and paying them properly.

Our students come to school to learn all the skills and abilities that they’ll need to grow up healthy, happy and productive in the 21st century. Our nation must ensure every child receives the education they need to succeed in life, and for every educator to be trusted and resourced to make that a reality.

Your children are worth it and so are their teachers

Rather than focussing on anti bullying we have changed modes into focusing on ‘Being Kind’ and nominating schoolmates, teachers, random kids doing kind stuff for ‘Random Acts of Kindness’, awards. Monday’s winners were: Makakaia Wakefield, nominated by Jade Griffith for regularly helping out with the after school cleaning when she is only a Year 7, and Scarlet Maguire, Isla McBurney and Emily Forward, nominated by Ameya Raut for voluntarily picking up rubbish around their Learning Centre. Tuesdays winners: Lucy Pugh, for being a good friend for Lilyana when she needed one, nominated by Lilyana Tarleton and Eli Pert for coming in and putting down all the chairs without being ask; nominated by Miss Pettersson. Any child or adult can nominate a student or staff member they see being kind - parents can nominate too. Nomination forms are in the office.

By focusing on the positive of being kind it is our intention to move from, what not to do, to what we should be doing.

No matter in what context you use the word bully it always has negative connotations.

“If we all do one random act of kindness daily, we just might set the world in the right direction” (Martin Kornfeld).

Eight extremely lucky Year 8 children, who were selected by One World Education, to represent Christchurch will be spending the July holidays in China with two of our teaching staff at the invitation of the Global Youth Ambassador Project’ China International Summer Camp. There is one other Christchurch Primary School, four Intermediates, a Year 1 to 10 school, an Area School and two secondary schools. We will be spending time in Beijing and Changsha. The children are cleaning the school to show gratitude for the boards contribution to their international travel, with One World Education paying for their internal transport, hotels and food and all of the teachers costs. How lucky these children are and what a great opportunity. My personal thanks to Nicky Edwards and Tash Fraser for offering to go with the kids. They will be teaching for one week of their holidays at Hunan Concord College of Sino Canada.