I hope this finds you well and you are enjoying some nicer weather over the last wee while.

As parents and caregivers you will either be supporting senior students through the stresses of study and external exams or in some cases as motivator of students with exams that are in the situation of having already passed the year! That can be tricky! You may have also found yourself as parent of a teenager now on holiday as they have completed the year and don’t have externals. It really is a long break for those students (and their families…). The super difficult situation you may be in as parents also is when your child has finished or they have a few exams and for many reasons find themselves short on credits to make passing impossible. Finally, if you are a parent of a junior student, enjoy that, these years are still to come!

In terms of supporting your child with exams, I would recommend getting in touch with subject teachers if your child needs some extra support or seem unsure what they should be doing. There are often tutorials and extra help being held at school and I think the best place to learn is with a teacher! At the very least it can support independent study (and gets your teen out of the house for a bit!)

For parents where your child states smugly ‘I have already passed so it doesn’t matter’ I hear you and feel your pain. Your child has been entered in the externals and therefore have a commitment to attend and, in my opinion, do their best. Sitting exams is a skill in itself and, who knows, next year your child may be relying on passing exams to pass the year and with that comes a whole lot of pressure. Doing their best in exams with the pressure off is a good practice for their future exams, including sitting their driver's licence and any tertiary exams they may end up sitting. Stick to your guns with this one!

Parents with a teenager now on holiday, just push for some balance in their day. Outside time is always good, but you guys know this stuff.

If your child is well short of NCEA credits, remind your child that NCEA was designed to be flexible across years and you can always be working towards a qualification. There is no such thing as repeating a year, so if your child is in Year 11 and doesn’t achieve NCEA Level 1 they come back as a Year 12 student and keep working towards Level 1 in Year 12 subjects. I have purposely simplified this so if you have further questions or would like to speak with a Year Adviser about what this might look like for your child next year please send an email to Megan.Johnston@staff.hagley.school.nz and she will sort an appointment out for you!

I spoke at prize giving about how we make 2023 ‘good interesting’ and in it I included things that we will be focusing on as a kura to make it ‘good interesting.’

These included using our new buildings to enhance learning for students in a range of new specialist spaces. We also have a number of wellbeing and recreational spaces for students. These include access to kitchenettes for heating up lunches and access to hot water, as well as a weights room. These will be great assets to our kura.

I also included a note that we will start and finish the year as Te Puna Wai o Waipapa – Hagley College in recognition of our commitment to Te Tiriti o Waitangi and the cultural narrative of our site being a place that Māori came to collect water.

We will have a school focus on equity and what that looks like for our students and their whānau and continue to develop leadership opportunities that sit outside a traditional school structure - one where leaders can be of any age!

I finished with a whakatauki for our leavers. Spare a thought for this group. Their entire NCEA journey has been affected by COVID-19 and yet they pushed through, and it was amazing to see the number of Year 13 subject and special prize winners and, in particular, the large number of University scholarship winners! It was a great year for scholarships and as a kura we are so grateful for the opportunities that many of our leavers have achieved so they are best equipped to succeed in the future.

The whakatauki reads “Kia whakatōmuri te haere whakamua”

As you leave this place, let your thoughts and memories return – walk into the future with your eyes fixed on the past.

What does that actually mean? Well it means that our leavers are part of the kaupapa of a unique 164-year-old secondary school. I hope they are proud to have been a Hagley student, and proud to speak well and think well of your place, Te Puna Wai o Waipapa – Hagley College.

Ngā mihi nui

Rowan