Nau mai, haere mai, warm greetings.

First of all thanks for the birthday wishes. Hearing all the birthday wishes as I walked around school reminds me how caring our staff, students and community are and although some of us dread adding another year to our age, if birthdays look like that then roll on the next one!

It is amazing to see what can be achieved and experienced in a school in the short space of two weeks. Over the last two weeks we have seen Brett Fairweather (Mr. Jump Jam) come out and run a jump jam session for the years 1-8, the year 5-8 duathlon, the start of our peer reading, lawn bowls, the Crash Bash show talking to our senior students about car safety, our senior PE students on a rafting experience in Hanmer,  all alongside running dynamic and challenging learning experiences in the classroom.

I have recently finished educationalist Sir Ken Robinson's new book "You, Your Child and School". Although it sounds like a parenting manual, it is not. The book is crafted in a way to better understand how we learn, guiding parents with principles and practices to help their children navigate school. In the book's early chapters it addresses the distinction between learning, education and school.

Learning is about acquiring new skills and understanding, education is the organisation of a programme of learning and school is a community of learners. People love to learn, particularly children. Education can take many forms including formal or informal, directed or self directed, online or offline.

So why is school so important? Most of the learning we do in our lives is with and from the people around us. "Learning is as much social as it is an individual process" - Robinson. It is our responsibility as a school to educate our tamariki with many collaborative, unique and challenging learning experiences. It is our responsibility to listen to our community and provide a well rounded education that grows our youth beyond the conventional academic focus. Our school curriculum is designed in such a way. 

Our school charter has been completed and published on our school website. The charter sets the focus for the school and our current strategic goals focus on excellence, community and innovation. This year we have set four areas of improvement which include a focus on:

• writing in years 1-10
  
• school leaver's qualifications
  
• student’s well being
• student engagement through attendance

Along with the above four areas we will also focus on further developing our careers programme, our gifted & talented programmes, prepare for a extensive refurbishment of our Science block and develop a cultural design plan for a wharenui (communal meeting place) at school.

Finally I would like to wish those involved in the Oxford A & P Show best of luck, as we all look forward to another wonderful show.

Mike Hart
Principal