Our senior students are well into their end of year external CIE examinations and next week Juniors will be sitting their own internal examinations for most of their subjects. Sitting examinations can be a particularly stressful time for our young people and developing the skills to cope with that stress is something we would like to develop in our students.

Huanui College opened in 2010, and since then our students have gained great success academically and in a wide range of extracurricular activities. Is it enough that the College caters for the academic and extracurricular needs of it’s students? What about student wellbeing?

The educational needs of a Year 12 student differ greatly to those of a Year 7 student.  Starting in 2017, the Junior School (Year 7 – 9) will be led by Brenda Rudolph who will relinquish her Head of English position. We are planning a new approach to the teaching and learning for our Year 7 – 9 students. For the most part students and parents will not notice much difference with academic rigour being a priority and specialist teachers for the different subjects. What we will be doing is incorporating “Positive education” into the teaching at Years 7 – 9. The goal of positive education is to encourage and support individuals to “flourish”. Flourishing is a combination of ‘feeling good and doing good’. Positive education helps students to strengthen their relationships, build positive emotions, improve resilience, promote mindfulness and encourage a healthy lifestyle. The idea of positive education comes originally from Martin Seligman a pioneer in positive psychology. Martin Seligman has developed an acronym PERMA which is the five most important building blocks of well-being and happiness.

Positive education will initially be taught in Years 7 – 9 where students will have one dedicated positive education class per week and it will be taught and modelled implicitly in all subjects in the Junior School. Our staff are currently undergoing training and are reviewing our programmes of learning to incorporate this new philosophy into the Junior School. It will be rolled out to the whole school in subsequent years.

This is an exciting opportunity to enrich our already excellent curriculum and I am sure it will have a positive outcome for all the students involved. If you have any questions regarding positive education and the changes to the Junior School for 2017, please do not hesitate to contact Brenda Rudolph.  Geelong Grammar school in Australia is a leader in positive education and this YouTube clip outlines what they are doing at this prestigious school.

2016 still has a few weeks to go after the examinations finish with Duke of Edinburgh tramps and our Year 9 students heading off to Rarotonga. School Prize giving will be on the morning of Thursday 8th December and I look forward to seeing you all there.