Tēnā koutou katoa, Mālō e lelei, Welcome to 2019 at Katikati College.

A special welcome to new students, families and whānau to Katikati College. Thank you for entrusting us with the education of your child. We have a dedicated team of staff who will do their best to ensure your child experiences personal growth and success, while also ensuring their wellbeing and the development of self-belief are forefront.

It is important for the College and parents/ whānau to work in partnership to make sure students are engaged in the learning opportunities provided. Positive partnerships between home and school are essential to ensure your child achieves personal excellence and make their MARK.

We continue to strive to enact our vision of being an An innovative learning community to maximise people potential. Our school slogan ‘Make your MARK’ is central to everything we do at Katikati College. It encompasses  Manaakitanga (Care & Relationships), Ako (Learning & Teaching ), Rangatiratanga (Leadership & Ownership) and Kotahitanga (Unity & Togetherness). These Māori values reflect the bicultural partnership that exists at our College and the type of learners we are striving to develop.

Our Achievement in NCEA

Congratulations to all our 2018 Level 1, 2 and 3 students who achieved NCEA. They achieved some outstanding results. There will be a whole school Academic Assembly on Thursday March 11 at 1.00 p.m. in the Action Centre to celebrate our incredible Merit and Excellence Endorsement results for Level 1, 2 and 3. All are well above the national average.

• Level 1 Merit Endorsement 38.8%, Excellence Endorsement 23.5%

• Level 2 Merit Endorsement 25.6%, Excellence Endorsement 19.8%

• Level 3 Merit Endorsement 22.6%, Excellence Endorsement 19.4%

Thank you to all staff and parents/ whānau who made this success possible for our students.

Our Learning in 2019

Student learning is packaged slightly differently for our senior students in 2019. In an effort to make our learning programmes more flexible, relevant and individualised we have adapted all our senior courses into semesters. This means that courses are designed to be completed in 15 weeks, either in Semester A or Semester B with most learning areas offering subject courses in both Semesters A and B. There will also be a three week period in Term 4 before NCEA exams start for students to obtain specific tutoring and support for their external exams. For example a student may only be sitting external exams in English and Maths, so this may mean they spend the three weeks just working on Maths and English.

We will also be offering a C Semester, which we are calling ‘Mini C’. This semester will be 5 - 6 weeks long and will commence while NZQA exams are in progress and will offer students additional opportunities to gain internal credits. These courses may include, but are not limited to, reassessment opportunities to gain credits missed during the year. They can also allow students to improve on grades that have already been achieved, or to undertake completely new stand-alone Achievement Standards that students can achieve with no specific prerequisite learning. 

 We believe that this change will improve the quality of learning and overall student achievement. For example, instead of a student gaining Level 1 NCEA with 120 Achieved Credits, we would like to see them instead gaining 90 Level 1 credits with 40 of these at Merit, so they gain Merit Endorsement overall. Thus student effort goes into improving the quality of the qualification, not just clocking up high numbers of credits.

This means that your child will be able to take up to 10 courses in one year.

Any questions you may have about these changes can be put into the Community Suggestion Box, which is located on our School Website or you can use this link. 

Learning Queries

We strongly encourage our whānau, parents and caregivers to work in partnership with our College to support the learning of our students. To further support this a flow chart to show where Learning Queries should be directed is available at https://goo.gl/K3mvWR.

In addition, an information sheet about who to go to when parents/whānau have questions about their child’s learning has been produced and shared. Information for all our parents wanting to make Learning Queries is available using https://goo.gl/fMvD9L . For our whānau / parents with students in our Whānau Pūmanawa class more information is available using  https://goo.gl/o8HGEj.  AIGA and Pasifika students will find more information at https://goo.gl/hKTkLY .

Thank you for all you do to support student learning.

Facebook

Please ‘like’ our page https://www.facebook.com/KatikatiCollege/ . We wish to share as much of the exciting learning and success that our students are involved with in a more timely manner and we will endeavour to upload lots of photos and information about what is happening in and around our College.

A more detailed hard copy Term 1 Community Newsletter will be sent out next week in the mail.

Nāku noa na

Carolyn Pentecost

Principal