Comments from the Principal

What another great week of weather and while it is wonderful to be in the sun simply enjoying summer, let’s remember our farming families who need a good dollop of rain about now!
It was good to see some of you at the Field Days this week. We enjoyed speaking to many ex-students, young families enquiring about future enrolments, and of course our current families and students. I would particularly like to thank the boarding staff and senior students who helped out over this time. Our Year 13 students who helped were certainly a credit to our College – thank you.
Many of you will have already discovered our brand new website. It looks fantastic and a big thanks must go to George Arthur-Amohau (ex-Head of Arts) who has worked hard to make this a true reflection of our school.  If you haven’t yet had a look, please take time to do so. There is more information further in this newsletter about what you will find within it.
We are very pleased to share with you another good set of NCEA achievement data from the 2017 year. Again, the provisional data shows that we are ahead of decile 8-10 schools nationally in all three levels of NCEA, as well as UE! This doesn’t happen accidentally but instead is the culmination of hard work by students, staff and parents, along with the thorough and individual academic counselling that occurs throughout the year. A couple of highlights I would like to share with you are:
74% of our Year 11 students received a Merit or Excellence endorsement compared with national data of 55%.






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100% of our Maori students who completed a full NCEA year achieved their NCEA level. This needs to be highly celebrated because nationally this is still an area of concern. This achievement speaks volumes about our school culture of belonging and care for each individual.
Tuesday lunchtime at school certainly had a good sense of energy and competitive spirit as the four houses competed in a Tug-of-War Competition organized by the Year 13’s. The year 7 & 8’s, and then the year 9 & 10’s had a great battle and we await the outcome of the senior battle next week. Thank you to our new Art teacher, Mr Tafa, who took some great photos of the action. You can see them on our Facebook page and later in this newsletter.
 
Lent has begun. We had a very reflective Ash Wednesday Liturgy this week to begin the six weeks of Lent. Compassion is one of our gospel values, and we are encouraging students to show this at school particularly during this time of fasting, prayer and giving. At assembly on Monday, we also talked about Shrove Tuesday or, what is often known as Pancake Tuesday. I did encourage our young people to make their parents pancakes for breakfast on Tuesday – I hope it worked for some of you!!
 
 Nga mihi nui
 

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