Welcome back for the 2018 school year. It has been a very busy start to the year for staff and students. It is always with great excitement and anticipation that we start another year and we welcome a new group of students and their families into our St Thomas family. Alongside our new students are a group of new staff that have joined us.

Jason Smallman has joined us from Avondale College in Auckland. Jason will be joining the Science Faculty. Jason is an international multisport athlete.

Jono Riddell has joined us from Rutherford College in Auckland, he will also be joining the Science faculty. Jono enjoys coaching rugby and has done this to a representative level.

Rachael Fowler spent her first year of teaching at CGHS last year. She is joining the Art and Technology departments. Rachel has a strength in Pasifika Culture.

Megan Heather has a background in Army and alternative education where she took a group of disengaged students on a discovery trip to Nepal. Megan joins our Learning Support with a focus in the Senior school.

Daniel O’Brien joins us from Linwood College and CBHS, he has recently finished as a Professional Rugby coach in Japan. Daniel is our new Director of Sport.

Haines Huang who is joining the languages department as a Mandarin language tutor.

Keith Barclay comes from a strong building background and is joining our property team.

Duncan Hume joins our IT department to support our boys IT needs and to monitor our IT infrastructure.

On Thursday we welcomed the new members to our community at our Powhiri, it is always a invigorating experience to observe the welcome offered by our current staff and students to the new members of our community. That same afternoon, during start of year mass, we acknowledged the student leadership team as they were presented with their badges and had their parents and family pin the badge on their blazer. It represents the partnership that we are working in, to raise our young men. To round off the week we opened our new building Te Whanaketanga. It has been a busy week, but we are well set up to launch into our core business of teaching and learning next week.

During our first assembly I talked to our students around our focus for this year on the 'little things'. They can often seem small but in fact are the difference between success and failure. Our real success is in our ability to attend to these key tasks, uniform, timeliness, respect, handing work in, asking questions. Our staff are all going to focus very closely on these matters, it would be fantastic to have whanau support in this approach.

One initiative I am going to implement this year is a 'Coffee Morning' on the first Thursday of each month. I will be available with the support of different senior leaders each month to meet in an informal manner. We will kick the February 'Coffee Morning' of on Thursday 8 February. This will be held in my office from 9am – 10am.

It was with great sadness that we farewelled Fr Graeme Blackburn after a motorcycle accident. Fr Graeme was the Paris Assistant at OLV Parish, he was a fantastic man. He will be sorely missed by both the OLV and STC community.

Could we also hold in our thoughts and prayers Maureen Gaffaney and Margret Guerin whose brother passed away after a battle with cancer, and Leuma Gali who also lost his brother this week.