by Kudos Awards

Winners of Prime Minister’s Education Excellence Award

One of the highlights of the school year, if not of the past decade, for our school was the national recognition St Paul’s Collegiate School received at the Prime Minister’s Education Excellence Award for leading the Agribusiness Initiative in a ceremony held at the Beehive on Tuesday 3 July.

Our school took out the ‘Excellence in Leading – The Atakura Award’, a prestigious award that ‘celebrates an innovative or condition changing breakthrough that leads to improved education for youth’.

The Award was presented by Acting Prime Minister at that time, the Honourable Winston Peters, in conjunction with the Minister of Education, Mr Chris Hipkins and Associate Minister of Education. 128 other schools had also been considered for the various categories of ‘Prime Minister’s Education and Excellence’. St Paul’s selection was fantastic recognition of our school’s leadership with the establishment, development and coordination of the national Agribusiness programme for NCEA Level two and three students around the country. Currently just under 50 schools have taken up the opportunity of teaching this very relevant and engaging new subject and it is hoped that a 100 schools will be on board next year.

In receiving this award, we need to recognise the amazing committed support that we have had from our principal partners: DairyNZ, Beef+Lamb and Gallaghers, as well as our eleven business partners: BNZ, Zoetis, New Zealand National Fieldays Society, AGMARDT, Greenlea, Waikato Milking Systems, AGrowQuip, Waitomo Petroleum, Campbell Tyson, Tetra Pak and Fairview Motors. Our thanks also go to Deputy Headmaster, Mr Peter Hampton for his outstanding leadership of this project, Mrs Kerry Allen for the great preparation she put in for NZQA and to resource the subject and Mr Chris Foot for his passionate implementation of the programme in our own school.