Friday 19th September 2025

Kia ora whānau

Thanks for all your support during the past term. It has been a busy one but also hugely rewarding and the boys continue to do amazing things.

I don’t normally single out individual students, but the achievements of Henry Ward (Year 12) do need highlighting. A fortnight ago, Henry won the national schools Under 16 Duathlon champs in Invercargill. To put this in perspective the boy from Auckland who came 2nd had recently finished 4th in the World Champs! Henry was running at 3-minute 20 seconds kilometre pace!

During the past fortnight we have had our senior ‘benchmark’ exams. I appreciate many boys may have been ‘underdone’ and their results probably reflect this. They now have 2 months to plan and study to achieve success. This is ample time if used wisely. The external exams begin on Tuesday 4th November. If you have any queries about exam preparation, please contact his class teacher directly.

On Wednesday we had a day focused on careers education, which was timely with recent exams, upcoming course selection etc. Thanks to all those parents who came afterschool to get guidance from Heads of Departments and Deans. It is reassuring to see you so invested in your son’s education. A reminder that the boys can go onto SchoolBridge (they have been emailed details how to do this) and select their courses for 2026. The deadline for this is Friday 10th October.

On the staffing front we are excited to announce the appointment of Mr. Tom Daly to teach Technology in 2026. Tom is a hard materials specialist. He is currently teaching in Ontario, Canada and has 16 years of teaching experience. We look forward to welcoming Tom and his family to Oamaru in the new year. We should be able to announce a new Teacher in charge of Mathematics at the beginning of Term 4.

I can also confirm some internal curriculum changes for 2026. At Year 9 Science and Social Studies will go from 4 to 3 hours per week. This allows Physical Education to now be taught for 2 hours a week throughout the year. This in turn allows Te Reo Maori to become a compulsory option at Year 9.

We are also moving over to Google as our IT platform in 2026. All data will continue to be backed up on Microsoft for next year only. The rationale behind this change is to remove a barrier for our new entrants – most of whom are familiar with Google at primary/intermediate school and also the other two secondary schools are with Google.

Congratulations to Quinn Neal (Year 12) on being elected as the student representative on the Board; Greg Familton as the Staff representative and to Stacey Hayes, Heather Martyn, Eric van der Spek, Akuhata Pirere and Megan Innes as the parent representatives. We look forward to an exciting new chapter of school governance that is about to begin.

It is amazing how quickly the end of the year comes around and for most of our senior students they will only have 4 weeks of formal school left for the year. With that in mind here are some key dates to put in the calendar for the next month. On Monday 13th October we have our Cultural excellence assembly during Period 5. On Wednesday 22nd October we have our Sports Prizegiving in the evening and on Wednesday 29th October we have our pinnacle event for the year – Senior Prizegiving which will be held in the recently renovated Hall of Memories. We are so excited to be getting back into the Hall, and this will only add to this wonderful occasion. Also, on Friday 31st of October we have our leavers dinner. Specific details of all these events will be communicated in due course.

Ahakoa he iti, he pounamu Although it is small, it is a treasure

Floreat Waitakia - We are Waitaki

Darryl Paterson

Rector

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