A Message from our Principal

Kia ora koutou

Thank you to all those parents who attended the Meet the Teachers evening on Monday. We were thrilled with the turnout and I hope that the conversations and whakawhanaukataka you experienced are just the beginning of a strong relationship between home and school. We have another absolutely delightful group of Year 7 children this year, and we thank you for entrusting your children to us for the next seven years – we will do our best.

Noticing that the auditorium was nearly full for this event was a reflection of our roll growth. In the last four years our roll has grown by 150 students – that is quite significant! I am proud of the hard work of our staff to provide programmes that are relevant, and that provide a strong learning foundation for success in the senior school and further learning after school. Last year, our whole staff along with the Catholic Primary Schools’ staff (through our Kāhui Ako) embarked on a journey to develop more consistency in teaching pedagogy across classrooms. We are revisiting what makes a learning-filled lesson as effective as it can be when taking neuroscience into account. We expect to see that any lesson we observe will have evidence based teaching practices, with a shared language that students will also understand and use when talking about their learning. We know that it is easy to slip back into ‘busy work’ filled with tasks that don’t necessarily cause learning. But every lesson counts and should be building on learning and content knowledge, lesson by lesson. We will continue this work in 2025 and I hope that you will start hearing your children talk about learning intentions, success criteria, knowing ‘what good looks like’, quality and timely feedback, rubrics, and self assessment. I know that teenagers can be somewhat ‘reserved’ when talking abut their learning or what they did at school today! However, asking what they learned in a specific subject versus what they did might help open up some great learning conversations.

Attendance

Because every lesson builds on the learning in the last lesson, being present as much as possible is very important. We are monitoring attendance closely this year and we are beginning to make contact with home if patterns of non-attendance are starting to form. While we realise that sickness and family emergencies can sometimes cause days to be missed, it is very important to establish good attendance habits that will also be a strength (and expected!) when they enter the workforce. The government talks about the low rate of students attending school 80% of the time or more. 80% means being present for the equivalent of four out of five days every week. Currently, across New Zealand, going to school five days a week is only occurring for about half of our children. As a country we need to be better than this! If your child is not wanting to come to school every day, there might be a bigger story going on for them and I encourage you to talk with the dean or pastoral teacher about this. We want every child to want to come to school every day – please help us to achieve this.

NCEA Evening Tonight

A reminder that tonight is the chance to come along to school to refresh your knowledge of NCEA. There have been changes to Level One recently, so I encourage you to be upskilled so you can have those learning conversations at home.

Thanks again for the preparation you have done at home prior to school beginning to have your children ready for learning – we have enjoyed getting underway.

Ngā mihi

Kate Nicholson