This month, our Board Chair, Alan Aitken takes a light-hearted look at a computer game about world domination and then compares it to the school Charter.

I thought I would start with a confession. Once upon a time I aspired to be an evil genius. 

In fact, I used to play a computer game entitled evil genius that gave you the chance to play like a super villain out of a James Bond movie. 

You could design and build your secret underground lair, recruit henchmen and send them out to do various nefarious deeds. Meanwhile the governments of the world would get their best soldiers and agents searching the globe to bring you to justice. 

The challenge was to complete your evil plan for world domination before the forces of goodness stopped you. Let me state for the record that there is nothing quite like bringing the world to its knees with a mind-control satellite!

These happy memories bring me to our school’s annual charter. 

Our charter certainly isn’t evil but on a good day we hope it has a touch of genius. The charter is a document that sets the direction of our school and identifies the priorities the Board expect our principal to be leading. 

Every school is required by the law to have one and they are updated and sent to the Ministry of Education annually.

The charter represents a formal description of our school. Who we are, what we are like, how we think and we want to be and do. 

Our charter includes things like:

• The Riccarton Way which forms the values base for our school life.
  
• A summary of our eight priority areas and their related goals.
  
• An overview of our annual review cycle
  
• Our 2015-2017 strategic plan
  
• Our international student strategy
  
• Our Maori and bicultural strategy
  
• Our e-learning strategy
  
• Our plan for 2017 to advance all these things
  

The priority areas in our charter are achievement, assessment, curriculum, learning environment, Maori students, Pasifika students, teaching and learning and special needs students. All these documents make for serious rather than exciting reading, but they are a foundation for exciting outcomes i.e. the learning and growth of our young people. 

You can ask to look at our charter any time but at 56 pages it’s not a quick read!

Something you will have noticed is that our current plan only goes until 2017. That means that this year we start to look ahead toward 2018-2020. Those years are already throwing up some challenging and exciting issues for us to think about and you’ll hear more about this as we gradually get to grips with it. 

One thing I’m wondering about is whether we can get plans for a secret lair in there somewhere!