Kia ora koutou. Talofa. Kia Orana. Malo e lelei. Bula vinaka. Fakaalofa atu. Namaste. Kumusta. Haere mai ki Te Kura Te Huruhuru Ao o Horomaka. Warm greetings to the Hornby High School community.

When engineers and builders build networks (things like road and rail networks, or fibre cable networks, for example) they usually try to build in what they call redundancy. That is, they try to make sure that there is some duplication, a second option, another ‘way to go’, Why? So that if a network fails at one point, then there is always an alternative, a Plan B.

I guess it might be summed up with this saying: ‘Hope for the best, plan for the worst’.

They don’t always manage it, especially in a country with the geography of Aotearoa. Our railway network in Te Wai Pounamu the South Island is a great example. When the Kaikoura earthquakes blocked the main rail line between Ōtautahi and Picton, there was no alternative. Our geography meant there was no ‘Plan B’. But it’s still important that we try whenever we can.

So these designers and engineers plan for failure, they expect failure to happen, somewhere, sometime. Life tends to be a lot like that. We will all fail, somewhere, sometime. It’s our ability to respond to that failure, to learn from it, and to bounce back, that defines us. This resilience, one of our four school values, helps to define our character, and among the questions we all ask is how do we build resilience in ourselves? How as parents do we build resilience, because in these Covid times we all certainly need it. In Ōtautahi over the past ten years we have been forced to develop resilience in order to cope with what the world has thrown at us.

Responding to others with kindness and empathy is important. We also tend to want to try to ‘rescue’ others. As parents we all want to rescue our children. That’s normal. It's an instinct that comes from our evolutionary past designed to help us to survive. However, if we go too far, our children never develop resilience. When our children ‘mess up’, as they inevitably will, we need to ensure that they confront the fair and reasonable consequences of their mistakes. That doesn’t mean we ‘leave them to it’. It means that we support them to accept and learn from their mistakes. That’s how we help them to ‘build that redundancy’ into their lives, how we help them to develop resilience. If done with kindness and empathy it works, it helps. In these Covid times we need to support our children with kindness and empathy, we need to help them to see that a little anxiety is normal, and in fact helpful.

From a ‘schooling’ point of view, our children need support to face their challenges. We can’t ‘rescue’ them. If they have been thoughtful and strategic they will have a ‘Plan B’ for their academic progress. For NCEA, our Qualifications Authority has created a Plan B with a limited range of ‘Learning Recognition Credits’ that to some degree allow for the disadvantage of time lost in classes. However it is still up to every young person to ‘smash it out’.

And what an absolute pleasure it was to see, on our return to face to face learning, the absolute focus of our rangatahi as they reconnected with each other, with their kaiako, and with their learning and their mahi. As I walk around our kura daily I see young people ‘head down, bum up’ (as my parents used to say). They are an absolute credit to you all. I cannot begin to tell you how proud I am. That is ‘Resilience’ at its best.

Please make sure you follow us on Facebook for the latest and most up to date news https://www.facebook.com/hornbyhighschool/ , and on our website www.hornby.school.nz . You can also follow my thinking our education journey at Hornby High School, and more generally, on my blog at https://whakataukihewakaekenoa.blogspot.co.nz/

Kia tau te mauri

Robin Sutton

Tumuaki