Video Weekly Wrap - 9 February 2024

Kia ora koutou

I hope you have all had a great week and enjoyed Waitangi Day on Tuesday. We are thoroughly enjoying the start to this term and despite our largest ever roll size, the school has been very settled and the atmosphere around the place is upbeat and positive. Similarly, dropping into classes I’m seeing students engaging in their learning, managing life without their phones as a distraction and being respectful in their interactions with others. I am very happy for the start we’ve had.

Speaking of Waitangi Day, our Board approved our strategic plan at the end of last year and it outlines our goals for 2024-2025, including our annual plan for 2024. We have been very deliberate in our efforts to honour and uphold our commitment to Te Tiriti o Waitangi in this strategic plan. Two important documents we’ve used to guide us are Ka Hikitia and the National Education and Learning Priorities. I have included links to those documents if you’d like to find out more and if you would like to read our strategic plan you can access it here.

In this week’s video newsletter I interview Anika and Oscar, our wonderful Head Students for 2024. It’s a good opportunity to get to know a bit about them, their ideas on leadership and what they are looking forward to about 2024. You can view the video here.

NCEA & scholarship results

When NCEA results were published a couple of weeks back, the media were quick to report a decline in overall results. I am very pleased to report that this is not the case for Paraparaumu College. We have consistently great NCEA results, well above national levels and results for similar schools and our results for 2023 have either remained at these high levels or even increased in the context of a decline nationally. Our results are still provisional and I will be able to report our final results in the near future, but at this stage they are indicating around 20% higher NCEA results at all levels, compared to national averages.

Scholarship results were released yesterday and I would like to congratulate the following students on their scholarship results:

Drew Ludlam - Health & PE
Hannah Harman - Health & PE, Chemistry
Charlotte Burgess - Health & PE
Isaac Nyhan - Media
Ellie Hall (Year 12, 2023) - Health & PE
Daniel Kim - Calculus

Student success

There are a number of student successes noted over the summer. Most recently we’d like to congratulate Duncan and Ella who were selected for the U13 Wellington All-Stars Softball Team at the recent U13 Rooxie Soxs ISA National Tournament.

You can read more about this and other successes over the summer on our Facebook page. We are always keen to hear of student success, so please do be in touch and let us know of something we can be sharing and celebrating together.

Year 9 BBQ

Our annual Year 9 Family BBQ is taking place on Thursday 15 February from 5pm - 6:30pm commencing in the auditorium. We hope that all Year 9 students will be able to attend with their family and whānau.

If you wish to attend, please register by Monday 12 February for catering purposes by signing up on the link here.