Our student leadership team have enjoyed an action-packed two days this week at the Papanui Youth Development Centre learning about, talking about and experiencing the seven habits of effective leadership.

Eight House captains, 12 class leaders, three student council reps, and two Kapa Haka leaders spent Tuesday and Wednesday at 'Te Koru' (PYD) in Papanui.

This experience is an important part of establishing our student leadership team culture - working together to make Casebrook a place where students have a powerful and active voice.

Students were engaged in loads of discussion, team work, challenging activities such as rock climbing, lunch with special education students, and finally presenting their experience through speeches to a large number of parents. 

Student highlights included:

• "The rock climbing wall was a real challenge for me because I'm scared of heights"
  
• "The food was awesome!"
  
• "It was good to hang out with kids who aren't in my class learning about something quite hard to do"
  
• "It feels like being a leader at Casebrook is a pretty cool responsibility"
  

This experience sets up our students for a year of pro-active leadership and builds the confidence we want our young leaders to have in our school.

We would like to thank Hamish, Laura and Sean for their awesome facilitation of the course and especially the food. Leadership on a full stomach is so much easier!

We are very fortunate to have a local community organisation such as PYD working with our Casebrook REPS.

Nick Leith