Amazingly, it's already the end of the school year, and senior exams will be over in the next few weeks. This year has flown by, and we’re ready for a great start to a hopefully uninterrupted year of learning, growing and engaging in 2023. As the new Board of Trustees Chair (now called Presiding Member), I am pleased to introduce myself and our Board and provide a short overview of our year and focus for 2023.

Brigham Nordstrom (Deputy Chair)

Hamish Bell

Samuel Hood

Josie Keucke

Vanessa Parker

Our other Proprietor Board members on the Board are:

• The Very Reverend Anne Mills

• Deborah Nelson

• Richard Calderwood

We also have the following staff and student representatives:

• Mary Curran (Principal)

• Susi Webb (Staff Representative)

• Issy Hussey (Student Representative)

The board's role is to oversee the governance of our school alongside the Proprietor’s Board and to ensure that everything that needs to be done is legal, ethical, and in the best interests of its students.

The board is responsible for developing and approving the school's mission, strategic goals and objectives and establishing policies related to programmes and services. Another duty of the board is to approve the annual budget and to set major programme fees. We are grateful for the parental support that enables us to provide the level of education we do.

As a board, the past three years have been challenging as we worked alongside the Proprietor’s Board and the school’s leadership team to manage the impact of COVID on our school community. The pandemic has caused unprecedented disruption, and the impact on the New Zealand education system has been significant. COVID-19 tested our resilience and demonstrated that we should expect the unexpected. It has also shown us how strong we can be as a Kura. We are incredibly proud of our young people here at Dio who demonstrated such resilience as they embraced and transitioned smoothly into distance learning.

Our vision of preparing confident, resourceful, and resilient young women to make a positive difference in their world has been lived out in these challenging times with enthusiasm and support for one another.

Our leadership team, teachers and support staff work extremely hard to make learning enjoyable and achievable whilst taking on the needs of all our students.

Our focus throughout the COVID pandemic has always been first and foremost on our students, staff and community well-being.

Being a connected community during lockdowns and restrictions remained crucially important. Regular social media activity, student-led videos and competitions, weekly online assemblies and chapel services, and regular COVID-19 updates emailed to caregivers and students attempted to bring a sense of connectedness. Despite this, it has not been the same as in-person connecting. We know that some parents/caregivers may feel disassociated with the school to some degree because many of the events where we gathered as a whaanau could not go ahead. This is something that all schools who diligently followed the Ministry of Health guidelines reckoned with and is an area of focus that we will be working to resurrect during 2023.

Regarding the school student numbers, we are in the enviable position of enjoying a stable and healthy roll. Like many other schools, we offer places at different year levels if and when we have space. This steady roll reflects our strong governance, high-performing sports and arts programmes and our consistently higher than the national average NCEA results across all levels. In 2021, 100 per cent of our students gained literacy across all year levels, and 100% of students in levels 2 and 3 and 99.2% in level 1 gained numeracy. We also obtained the highest NCEA results of any Waikato school.

Since the late-2000s, the performance of New Zealand students in international standardised tests measuring numeracy, literacy, and science has been slowly but steadily declining. It is something that the Ministry of Education and other educational organisations are currently addressing. At Dio, we are taking action to counter this. From next year, our calendar will be dedicating additional hours to literacy and numeracy in the junior school, ensuring students are best equipped to take on the academic rigour of senior school. Principal Mary Curran will share more about how this will look once our timetable is finalised.

Meeting the needs of our boarders is the primary focus of our catering operations; however, the school also has an external catering arm. The Mr Goodfellow Food Truck (financially supported by the School Association) and catering business is a school-owned and operated venture run by our catering team. Its purpose is to build an external catering service that will bring revenue to the school to support teaching and learning. Check out the advert in this issue of DioNews, or go to www.mrgoodfellow.co.nz to get your Christmas catering sorted.

We look forward to seeing the Mr Goodfellow Food Truck at more school events soon. As an aside, Sir William Goodfellow was one of the original owners of the River Rd land on which the school now resides.

I want to thank the School Association for their work towards the life of the school. They are committed to creating opportunities to fundraise, ' friend raise,’ and bring our community together. The Association represents parents who know the importance of advocating for students' social, emotional and academic well-being and want to ensure those needs are our school's number one priority. As we move into 2023, I strongly encourage you to support their efforts and help everyone know more about the Dio community.

Once we know about concerns or community feedback, we can provide further clarity or context. I want to remind everyone that we are all learning from our collective experiences from the past three years. We welcome your insights and feedback as we move forward. If you have thoughts to help us move forward, please pass them on to our Principal, Mary Curran, at principal@wdsg.school.nz

It’s also an ideal time to remind everyone about the feedback and concerns process. Please contact your daughter's teacher in the first instance for subject-related matters and then, if needed, move through the process that can be found in the school handbook. Don't hesitate to contact your daughter's dean or the principal directly for more general concerns or feedback.

We want to take the best from this journey to grow and explore curriculum innovations and constantly review programmes and pedagogy, with experiences for learners continually enhanced and improved. Our focus is now not to look back at what has been missed but look towards what we can optimise for the future - prioritising learning, cultural and spiritual activities, safety and expression, and restoring connections.

We are in a very strong position moving into 2023. Our recently completed Education Review Office (ERO) review and independent appraisal have highlighted Waikato Diocesan School for Girls as extremely high-performing. Both also took the step of highlighting the leadership and direction of our Principal, Mary Curran. Mary is very humble in her accolades, but we can rest assured that our school is in very capable and experienced hands. She is a strong leader with pedagogical expertise whose focus and dedication to our students, staff and community are embedded in her Christian faith and unwavering commitment to educational excellence.

On behalf of the Board of Trustees, I wish to thank all members of the Dio community who continue to support “their school”. We value you all.

In closing, it does seem a little early, but here’s to a safe, fun and relaxing festive holiday season.

I look forward to seeing you at different events during 2023. Please say hi.

Noho ora mai.

Nga mihi

Raewyn McPhillips

Presiding Member (Chairperson), Waikato Diocesan School for Girls Board

Boards' Secretary - Joy Houghting  jhoughting@wdsg.school.nz