Principal’s Notes
Term 2 Holiday extended to 3 weeks at Springs:
As we accelerate towards a move into the new school in July, I’m keen to share with parents in as many forums as possible the details of what I have already shared at last year’s prizegiving and with our students in assemblies – and that is our Term 2 holiday at Springs will be three weeks long instead of two, beginning on July 8th and concluding on July 26th.
The reason for this extended break is to allow two weeks for the movement of gear and equipment out of the old school and into the new. The third week will be a ‘teacher only week’ where we will unpack equipment, familiarise ourselves with our new environment and how we are going to manage students within it before they arrive for Term 3, which for us begins on Monday July 29th.
As our 2019 roll pushes through 1600 students I have made some decisions aimed at maximizing learning time to compensate for the longer holiday and the loss of a week’s teaching in Term 3. We will no longer run ‘mock’ exams in Term 2, instead concentrating on the internal assessments our students are working on at this time. This will save 3 days of what is usually study break for our seniors. We will also not run our intermediate school workshops which will save another day that is normally ‘study time’ for our seniors prior to the mock exams in Term 2. We will continue to run the practice exams for 6 days in Term 3 – a much more realistic assessment time for students as they approach the real thing in Term 4.
On this note, I am pleased to report that our 2018 examination season results are of a very high level indeed. Our focus has been on grade quality, with an aspirational target of 70% of our students’ grades being at Merit or Excellence. We exceeded our target by 8% at Level 1 with 78% of our grades at that level.
Our target at Level 3 was for 50% of our grades to be at Merit or Excellence and our students managed to exceed this target by 14% with 64% of our students achieving Merit or Excellence here. We missed our aspirational target at Level 2 where 62.5% of grades were at Merit or Excellence. Our target here, as at Level 1 was 70%.
The good news continues at Scholarship Level – where two of our students have received Top Scholar in the Nation – Ruskin Swedlund for History and Jack Naish for Technology. Again emphasizing our focus on quality, 10 of our Scholarship awards were at the level of Outstanding. 14 scholarships were awarded to Springs students in History (6 Outstanding) more than any other school in the country; 4 in Dance (1 Outstanding); 3 in Art Design, Te Re Maori; 2 in Drama and Photography (both Outstanding in Photography) and 1 each in Physical Education and Health, English, Classical Studies, Biology and Technology.
Understandably we are all buoyed by these excellent results and wish to congratulate all of our students for doing so well!
Ivan Davis
Principal
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