In recent weeks my focus has been on international education. I arrived back in New Zealand on Sunday after two weeks spent in three different countries.

I started off in Auckland at the NZ International Education Conference which is a conference for organisations involved with international students. I presented a workshop on our Global Leadership Programme which was was well received with a number of participants expressing an interest in establishing something similar in their own schools.

From Auckland I flew to Bangkok, Thailand where I met up with other schools and tertiary institutions at events hosted by Education New Zealand. These events included an Agent seminar, where I met with agents who send students to New Zealand, and a Fair, where prospective students and their parents talk with schools and tertiary providers in order to make decisions about where they want their child to study. The US and UK have traditionally been the main destinations for Thai students but the impact of Trump and Brexit are seeing this change. These factors, combined with the fact that New Zealand is seen as a safe destination where the quality of education is very high, has led to an increasing number of students from Thailand wanting to study here. At the Fair I had the help of Bow Benjukal who acted as translator for me. Bow attended Otago Girls’ from 2014 to 2016 and left at the end of Year 12 to return to Thailand to take up her university studies, something that the universities’ entry criteria make possible. She is now studying Political Science and International Relations at Thammasat University - one of the top Thai universities. Her experience of an international education was one of the factors that helped her selection into this limited programme. The legacy of an OGs education had helped her get into the course she wanted which was great to see. What was even nicer for me was that the friendships she had made while here at Otago Girls’ had endured. The previous day she had had lunch with two OGs ex-girls who were in Bangkok - Edie Bennie and Honour Sandall showing the strength of the friendships established between international and domestic students. We are so fortunate at this school to have amazing young women from around the world study with us and we encourage the girls to take the opportunity to get to know each other.

From Bangkok I travelled to Tokyo, Japan where I met with parents and potential students and more agents. With Japan gearing up for the Rugby World Cup in 2019 and the Olympics in 2020 English is becoming increasingly visible in the signage around the transport networks and I had a meeting with parents whose rugby mad daughter wants to come and study here in the future. How fitting it was that I had just that day received a Facebook Event post inviting me to watch our 1st XV play in the final of the Otago Secondary competition next week. This family were delighted that there was a school in a safe and welcoming location where their daughter could get a great education and play rugby. I then flew down to Hiroshima to visit our sister school, Yasuda Girls’ High School where I saw many of the girls who travelled out to New Zealand last month. The school was starting to prepare itself for changes to the Central examination which occurs on one day, assessing every subject the students study. The grade the student receives determines whether a student can go to university at all and which universities will accept them. What is changing is that instead of being required to simply regurgitate information, students will now be required to apply knowledge by applying skills and understandings to an unknown problem. This is a major change for Japanese schools which are currently working out how they can change their teaching approaches to address this development. While it takes some explaining for Japanese families to understand the New Zealand curriculum, teaching and learning styles and qualification system, they can see the benefits of what we do. Seeing their system in action reminded me of how fortunate we are in New Zealand that students can follow their passions and interests and that their results are not reliant on one, incredibly high stakes exam.