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Principal's Address

Robin Sutton —

Mā te huruhuru, ka rere te manu. ‘Feathers enable the bird to fly’

During the year Kaye Banks, Penny Devine, Donna Sullivan, Rochelle Jackson, and Simon Evans, served on our Board of Trustees, and student representative Crystal Edminstin completed her second term with the Board. Thank you to you all for your time, your work, your wisdom and your support. A special thank you to Crystal, and our best wishes as you now head out on your next adventure with life beyond Hornby High School. Nadia Officer was elected as our new student trustee on the Board. Welcome, Nadia. Nau mai haere mai.

To our wonderful staff, thank you. You are amazing colleagues, I’ve said it before and I repeat that you show yourselves to be the risk takers that our rangatahi need in education. We know that risk taking is essential for creativity to thrive.

I would like to make special mention of our support staff. I start each year by making my point that every member of our Hornby High School team is essential to our operation. No organisation is in the position where it simply creates jobs because it wants to give away money. Every job is essential, and our support team do their essential work with efficiency and good humour, and with real aroha for our learners. Thank you.

Of special note was the settlement of the Teacher Aide pay equity claim. This has meant that our TA team members are financially acknowledged for their real worth. I like the terminology that has begun to be heard, describing them as ‘paraprofessionals’. This much more appropriately describes their roles in schools. Indeed we would find it difficult to have the success that we do with troubled children in particular without their skill and humanity.

Another development of note was the Government announcement of Hornby High School’s eligibility for participation in the free school lunches programme. I can report that the Board of Trustees opted in to this programme, and work is currently underway to determine how free lunches will be delivered to Hornby High School students in 2021.

I would also like to add my personal thanks to two often unseen/unheard members of the support team who offer me such wonderful support. They are our Executive Officer Sandra Martin, and Joanne Bykerk our PA to the senior leadership team. Your skill, your unconditional support, and your overwhelming gentleness and kindness, make my own life so much more productive and focussed, and I know for a fact that many others on our team feel similarly. Thank you.

I love to quote the words of famous people, they inspire me, and I guess I hope that they might inspire others too. It’s the words of Jewish refugee Albert Einstein that come to mind at the right now. Einstein is reputed to have said ‘Insanity is doing the same thing and expecting a different result.’

It is a philosophy that has driven a lot of our work over these past few years at Hornby High School. We have been on our own journey to reform our curriculum, and the learning that our rangatahi experience, with the aim to improve engagement and achievement, focussed at this time in our junior years. This is a journey for which we have much to thank many staff. We have their innovation, their ‘creative excellence’, and much more, to be grateful for as they have engaged in and taken up the challenge to change how we do things, and how we engage with and support our rangatahi.

Our reforms to our pastoral system with our Wānanga time for junior students, and the introduction of increasingly cross curricular approaches to causing learning are, if early data is anything to go on, proving to be having a significant impact on outcomes. We have been sufficiently buoyed by what we see that we have continued with these reforms, extending our wānanga time into years 10 and 11 for 2021.

Why the changes? At the risk of being repetitive with a message I gave several years ago, we continue to hear from those of a right wing persuasion that our system is not fit for purpose, that we are failing students, and they match this with their clarion call to return to what we used to do, what we have done for decades past. These commentators reference the international testing data called PISA to show that we are slipping further and further behind. What they don’t do is to interrogate the data, because if they did, here is what they would find. Our pākeha children perform pretty much as well as the best in the world. But we have a long tail of underachievement, and it is our Māori and Pasifika children who are overly represented in that tail. What we have done over past decades has failed those children. Let me state that again. It is not those children who have failed school, it is school that has failed them. So why would we think that returning to that old educational paradigm was going to improve things? Surely suggestions that we return to what we have always done are indeed insanity. And given the children who are over represented in that tail of underachievement this tells us that the systems of old contain embedded institutional racism. I have made reference before to my opinion that to persist with what we have always done, knowing this, is to continue to embed that institutional racism in our educational system, and in society.

This is our moral imperative: to liberate ALL learners, to allow ALL learners to be the best they can be, regardless of race, ethnicity, or household income. It is also our economic imperative. Why would we knowingly write off the economic, creative, and cultural, potential of over a third of our population? Insanity, indeed.

It would not be possible to talk about the year 2020 without mentioning Covid-19. It has kept us apart, fueled our anxieties, and shaped our lives. The stresses on us all - whānau, rangatahi, kaiako, all of us, have been huge and I want to offer my gratitude to everyone of you, regardless of your role, for the work you have done, the resilience you have shown, as we face the challenges of the pandemic fighting both our individual and often unseen battles, and the collective battle that has perhaps become best known with the PM’s phrase ‘team of 5 million’. We have shown the power, the impact, of The Manaiakalani Programme as our learners and kaiako shifted almost seamlessly from our traditional face to face learning to a fully online one. The affordances of the digital technology, and our Learn Create Share pedagogy, meant that learning was available almost uninterrupted for everyone. Whether or not learners took up those opportunities was a different matter. Results at the senior level suggest that our seniors were up for the challenge. Once more a record number of students gained their NCEA endorsed with Excellence before they left school on examination leave. All Manaiakalani schools were in a privileged position compared with most kura in the country as a result of our readiness for just such learning. That doesn’t mean it was easy, but it did clearly show the power of the work we do daily on learning with a coherent pedagogy in a digital learning environment. Thank you again to our kaiako, and to our rangatahi .. job well done!!

To the Manaiakalani Education Trust, thank you again for the wonderful tāonga you have gifted to us, to our learners, to our whānau - valuable beyond compare.

Once again our warmest thanks to the members of the Uru Mānuka Education Trust who have done amazing work to support our work across the cluster, and to the Wayne Francis Charitable Trust who have again made the investment into our Uru Mānuka cluster.

Our work in the Uru Mānuka Kāhui Ako, our Hornby cluster, has again meant strength, consistency, and coherence, for our learners as they progress through their educational journey from New Entrant to Year 13. Of note this year was the start of some serious work to strengthen connection with the wonderful early childhood education facilities in the Hornby area. My colleagues, the Principals of our partnership schools in the cluster, are skilled and dedicated professionals and it is a privilege and a pleasure to work alongside you. I would like to make special mention of Mr Gary Roberts who co-leads our Kāhui Ako with me. Gary is a dynamic progresive educator and leader who leads with heart, skill, and focus. We are all the richer for his presence and his work.

I have to say thank you to a growing number of supporters of our kura. This growing list is a symbol of the support, the love and kindness, the faith, that our community has in our students, our whānau, and our staff.

XCM Group Ltd

Unanimity Sumner No 3 Freemason Lodge

Wastecare

Terra Viva

Fuji Xerox

CERT Trust

Mainland Foundation

Crest Clean

Westpac - Hornby Branch

Orica Chemicals

Hornby Rotary Club

Hornby Residents Association

Hornby Working Men's Club

Hei Hei Medical Centre

Redeemer Church

Wayne Francis Charitable Trust

To our 2020 prize winners, well done. We acknowledge and celebrate your attitude, your persistence, and your achievement. The prizes we award acknowledge only one part of the wonderful achievement of our students, but that achievement represents much about our purpose as a kura.

To our 2020 Prefects, thank you for your leadership and your commitment to the school. Yours has been a difficult year, one that has tested your own Commitment, Achievement, Resilience, and Respect. That is, you have carried yourselves at all times as the living embodiment of our school values. You have modelled the very kindness that I think is essential to healthy caring inclusive communities. Your daily actions are an example and an inspiration to us all, you are all a wonderful example of the values based servant leadership that the world desperately needs. Kia tau te mauri.

To all of our leavers - please know that you take with you our best wishes, and the knowledge that at Hornby High School you have your turangawaewae, your place to stand. I say this every year, and I do so because it is true: you are an outstanding group of young men and women. Thank you for everything you have contributed to our kura. Well done on all that you have achieved. Thank you for the people that you have become.

Kia mau ki te tūmanako, te whakapono me te aroha

Hold fast to hope, faith, and love.

Noreira tena koutou tena koutou tena koutou katoa

R Sutton

Tumuaki