Here is the latest regarding work at Harewood.

As we start a new school year at Harewood the Board of Trustees are really excited to be able to share with you some information about our upcoming rebuild/refurbishment. As many of you will know we submitted our Education Brief to the Ministry of Education in the middle of last year. They came back to us with some preliminary plans late last year. We wanted to wait until we had some confirmation that these plans were definite before sharing with you.

A key focus of our education brief was the value we place on collaboration and the desire to give each of our teams a collaborative workspace. With this in mind our building plans include converting our current multi-purpose room into 2 learning spaces, likely to be the new Kahikatea block. Rooms 6, 7 and the Resource Room will be demolished and a new multi-purpose room built in their place. The Harakeke block (Rooms 1,2 and 3) will be fully refurbished as part of this process. Rooms 8 and 9 have recently been refurbished so these two classrooms would be untouched.

We were initially told that the building process would begin during 2020. This was a factor in the decision to move the Kahikatea team out of Rooms 8 and 9 to minimise disruption during the school year. We are about to begin meetings with our project manager, architectural team and mana whenua and it now seems likely that construction will not start until early 2021.

There are still many details to be sorted and we are looking forward to seeing some designs from our architectural team. If you would like to discuss these plans further or have any comments or thoughts Julie would love to hear from you.