Macleans College Newsletter

Senior Prizegiving, Principal's Speech

Monday 2 November 2015

Good afternoon and welcome to our 2015 Senior Prize-giving.

On behalf of the school I would like to particularly acknowledge the large group of parents and other family members present, the representatives of universities, polytechnics and other organisations that support and host our graduating students; The Hon. Maurice Williamson MP for Pakuranga, our Board of Trustees Chairman Mr Tony Gillion and Mrs Belinda Gillion, and other Board Members – Mrs Megan Clotworthy, Mrs Debbie Rowland, Mr Alan Figgins, Mrs Lynne Guy and Mr Michael Guy, and Mr Richard Wilkie and Mrs Anne Wilkie.

Also on behalf of the school and community, congratulations to all of our prize-winners. Recognition of your hard-work, ability and your achievements is why we are here having this ceremony today.

It is now my pleasure to provide a brief summary of the major highlight of our 2015 school year and the booklet that has been produced for today provides more in-depth information.

Our results in 2014 were again very pleasing.

Outside of the main examinations a growing number of students are now travelling each year all over the world to attend Olympiads in Mathematics, Biology, Chemistry and Physics in particular, and this year was no exception to this.

Local academic competitions are always well represented by Macleans students as well; Mathex, Eton Mathematics, the Spelling Bee and Young Enterprise are very popular.

The opportunities offered to students pursuing vocational subjects, which lead directly to apprenticeships for example, grow all the time and work experience programmes such as Gateway and our students attending Polytechnic courses complement this qualification pathway at school.

Our Maori and Pacific Island Mentoring programme continues to flourish and this is very pleasing.

The vast extra-curricular programme that is offered in music, drama, stage challenge, Kapa Haka, speech, debate, Model UN, chess and a wide-range of sport is an ongoing attempt to provide our students with a stimulating opportunity to participate, enjoy and achieve in a major support area to the pivotal classroom.

Complementing these activities are the various school-wide and house-based charities. Our students are always very generous and illustrate an active and ongoing goodwill to those less fortunate, and the other worthy causes that are so well supported with donations and time.

Our student roll is just under 2,600 and the school employs 238 teachers, administration and support staff.

Our student roll included 400 international students this year and at any one time some 340 were present at the school.

The opening of the all-weather Turf in the middle of this year will be followed by a neighbouring and a cricket wicket and oval doubling in the winter for Football.

It is hoped to have a fully operational pavilion with shower and toilet facilities ready for the next winter sports season down at this complex.

The school has purchased a building in Wellington Street in Howick and will be using the upper floor at this stage for ESOL teaching, a language school and a summer school for the gaining of university entrance literacy credits. The Westpac Bank remains in the ground floor.

Our weather tightness project which will now see all of the school rebuilt including the student toilets and the walkways, and apart from the main administration foyer, is now in its 7th year and we expect another 4 years before full completion.

Currently Upham House is being rebuilt and a demolishing and rebuild of Mansfield is planned to start next year. The major $10m+ project to demolish and rebuild the Senior Science laboratories, technology workshops and classrooms has been delayed for over a year and I will briefly return to this focal area shortly.

The ongoing toleration of our students and teachers to all of this disruption is gratefully acknowledged.

Financially the school is in a very sound state backed by reserves built-on every year and we are very grateful to the 90% of our parents who help us with the annual donation.

In our major focal area of the classroom and in teaching and learning, there continues to be opportunities to enhance what we can offer our students and some interesting challenges.

This year we embarked on a school-wide campaign to upskill our students in essay and paragraph writing and it has been very encouraging to see the enthusiasm in which this is being worked at.

This initiative will continue next year and one obvious and major spin-off to the finessing in the acquisition of this life-long skill will be more confidence in the planning and writing of examination questions.

Another focus has been re-writing parts of lesson plans so that students are able to utilise the benefits of the BYOD tool and this usage will spread rapidly over the next year or so, as will a coding programme.

The construction of our multi-million dollar replacement Senior Science and Technology block, which I mentioned I would return to, has brought us into a confrontation with the Ministry of Education and the proponents of what has become a euphemism for an un-researched teaching and learning pedagogy and titled the MLE (or Modern Learning Environment).

We completed, with the Ministry of Education approved architect, a plan for this block a year ago. We modelled a lot of the features, particularly the large open spaces outside the laboratories and workshops, on the core Commons area in our whanau houses.

Plenty of light and air circulation complements the planned atrium and there is ease of egress between and in the rooms, open spaces and with the rest of the school.

The sticking point we discovered, and the major cause of the delay in getting our plan off the drawing board, was the concern of an MLE supervising panel in Wellington that our open spaces adjacent to the classrooms were too small and our laboratories, workshops and classrooms needed to be smaller so the open spaces could accommodate the much larger groups of students and different classes who they anticipated would be working side-by in these expanded areas, as occurs now in ‘open-plan’ schools.

We are adamant that there will be no compromise on our classrooms being able to accommodate a class of students with their teacher and separated from everybody else, as they have since 1980, even by glass walls, so that entity can get on with the effective and well-proven teaching and learning episodes in their own environment.

We have planned for the flexibility that has been available and so successful in the whanau houses with the Commons space since the school’s founding, so that teachers and their classes can carry on with individual and group or collaborative work inside the laboratory, workshop and classroom or in the adjacent open spaces.

A re-launched bandwagon that quickly lost its wheels, traction and credibility in the early 70’s as it was run out of town, has now rolled into this school. Again the un-researched premise that students can learn as effectively without much of the well-researched and time-proven episodic lesson structure being featured is not going to happen at Macleans and will be resisted as the fad that it is.

This episodic structure is the indispensable feature of all good lessons planned and led, front and centre, by effective teachers.

We are not alone in this resistance as an increasing number of schools are realising that MLE does not just mean desirable and innocuous, well-lit, comfortable, airy classroom blocks.

We now realise that the proponents of the MLE have attached themselves to a tenuous link between pedagogical best practice and school design.

The well-known New Zealand educationalist Professor John Hattie’s research and published work has been used by these proponents to forge this link. In his 2009 book Visible Learning Hattie states, “What is most important is that teaching is visible to the student and learning is visible to the teacher”.

This ‘visibility’ has been taken literally and now school buildings are being designed so that students can observe other students learning through glass walls and in open spaces.

In his latest work, Politics of Distraction, published this year Hattie comments on this fallacious connection “new buildings are particularly promoted when they are different: lots of glass, no walls or doors, for example. Yet there are so many studies and meta-analysis that show that changing the shape of buildings does not lead to teachers teaching differently.”

There is a huge irony in this situation.

Forty years ago, in September 1975 to be exact, a major paper was published with a foreword by the then Minister of Education, Phil Amos, which collated the findings of a who’s who of prominent NZ educators, officials and architects who researched in New Zealand and abroad about the ideal design for New Zealand schools.

The paper was titled Secondary Schools for Tomorrow. A new approach to Design and Construction. The Whanau House School.

In his foreword Phil Amos stated, “Especially attractive to me is the Whanau House Concept and the attempts that have been made to make both the individual Whanau Houses and the school as a whole an exciting environment for living and learning in which the individual can live with dignity and at the same time feel … a contributing member of a larger, caring community both inside and outside the school”.

… and sums up …

“…In my opinion this report ranks as a very significant statement on secondary education.”

Five years later, in 1980, Macleans College opened and over the past 36 years the foresight and vision of these planners, researchers and officials has been well and truly realised.

Those of us who have the privilege to work here, and many of us have spent years in other schools, believe implicitly that this is the best model for a secondary school that we have experienced in New Zealand and overseas and it is a great pity that more Whanau House Schools have not been built in New Zealand, and more consultation taken with those of us who will attest that it is a world-class concept. We will keep you abreast of developments as we attempt to resolve this issue.

We farewell a number of staff and thank them for their contribution to Macleans.

Ms Rebecca O’Leary is leaving to take up the position of Head of English at St Peter’s College, Auckland. Ms O’Leary is a gifted teacher and enhanced the English Faculty, and was a very keen and talented netball coach of our Premier Girls’ team this year.

Mr Anton Bentley is moving to Nelson and has had two very productive stints with us for a total of six years. He is a very gifted drama teacher, producer and director. The plays and musicals he has been responsible for have been quite outstanding.

He leaves us as one of the pre-eminent directors in New Zealand secondary education and forever remembered for his collaboration with Mr Nigel Weeks on our benchmark 2013 musical – Les Miserables.

Ms Sian Durbin is leaving us for family reasons to reside and teach in Northland and has five years with us as Head of Department Chemistry has been hugely productive. Ms Durbin is a highly talented teacher and the results she has achieved are consistently outstanding.

Mr Nigel Weeks aka The Maestro For the past nine years we have had the privilege of having New Zealand’s finest secondary school music teacher on our staff.

The concerts, productions and competition results speak for themselves. Who would have thought a school could stage a major gala concert in the Parnell Cathedral, let alone the Town Hall, every year for over a decade?

For many years Mr Weeks has produced the top schools’ Symphony Orchestra, Concert Band and Chamber Orchestras in Greater Auckland and New Zealand. He has overseen the growth of our choirs and singing groups into regional and national prominence and brought soloists in various disciplines through to the same lofty heights.

His work output, stamina and sheer bloody-mindedness to get the best out of every Macleans College musician is legendary. We are beneficiaries of this huge talent today.

“He will be sorely missed” is a phrase with a real sting in it as we farewell Mr Weeks. Time and again over the years as I sat and listened and watched him rehearsing the various ensembles I thought “here is a master teacher conducting a master-class in teaching and learning”. I have never seen anything like it.

Mr Goldsworthy is retiring and returning to Whanganui where he and his family lived for many years when he was on the staff at Whanganui Collegiate.

For just over 11 years or so Mr Goldsworthy has been a highly able teacher of English and a most affable, supportive and hard-working member of staff.

You can look back on a great career Mr Goldsworthy and we were most fortunate to have you here at Macleans.

Mr Marty Scott is leaving teaching after spending his 13 year career in the profession with us at Macleans.

He is a very astute, talented teacher who has always produced very good results and a most effective Head of Geography.

Mr Scott was always keen to help in the extra-curricular area of the school. Scores of current and ex-students will reflect with gratitude on all of the extra work he put into his management of a succession of hockey teams during the winter season and at various national competitions.

Mr Ray Kelly is retiring after 27 years’ service at Macleans College and for most of those years he has been the Head of Faculty Technology.

Mr Kelly has been a most conscientious teacher; hard-working and always with the best interests of the students at heart.

He can look back with great pride on a teaching career where he taught generations of students well, with care and with the teaching of practical life-long skills as the dominating theme of his workshop and faculty.

In conclusion –
The school would like to acknowledge the commitment, hard-working and sheer scale of achievements that make our students so successful and a pleasure to work with, and we thank you, the parents, for your obvious influence on this and your support of Macleans College.

Thank you to our school leaders at all levels who contributed so much to the school and, in particular, our Head Prefects of 2015 – Annaliese Wheeler, Saffron Huang, Kieran Paterson and Caleb Sio.

Our staff are of high calibre and you get an insight into that talent as we recognised those who were farewelled a moment ago. Thank you for your loyalty, hard-work, support and always having the best interest of our students at heart.

A special thanks to the senior management team who are always a pleasure to work with.

Finally and to conclude …

Thank you to our presenters for their time, generous donations and prizes and to our invited guests, parents and family for attending our 2015 senior prize-giving.

Thank you to the Art Faculty for the display of student work and thank you and congratulations to Mr Weeks, Mrs McNabb, Mrs Saunders, Mr and Mrs Sarah, Mr Saunders, the Macleans College Symphony Orchestra, Concert Band, Choir, Kapa Haka group and our piano soloist – Kenny Chu.

Best wishes

Byron Bentley
Principal