Annette Joyce - Part 3

Transcript

Annette Joyce: “I’ve learned heaps this morning as I hope you have just from listening to these two because you think you’re doing good things at your school, and then you hear about another idea and you think, ‘Yea, that would fit, that would fit, we could look at that one.’ And that’s what it’s about, all of us sharing ideas and really I guess my final message to you is just to say that, if ever at any stage you want any thoughts, advice, I’d like to say wisdom but I’m getting older but I don’t know that there’s any wisdom there yet, but, but anything at all to do with that programme in terms of a principal perspective, I am really, really happy to talk to you on the phone or to see you. And a number of people already do that and I think it’s great. All I’m doing is giving back what others have given to me and that’s how it works.

“I’d like to say to you because many of you, I spoke a little bit to I think at one of the earlier huis and I said it because, I have been desperately concerned about the ongoing funding and, and what is going to happen, and I do believe it is something as a group we need to pick up on. I believe that we should effectively register ourselves, we’ve called ourselves the Te Kotahitanga School since 2003. It was the first public thing I did, that year as soon as we’d become part of it when I put the ads in the Gazette I said, and to be honest I don’t think I even knew what it meant, but I said, ‘We are a Te Kotahitanga school,’ so in other words I was hanging my sign up out there to say to people, ‘If this isn’t the way of the world for you don’t apply.’ But if it is, and what I’ve found ever since then is virtually everyone that applies for our school, talks to me in their letter about their knowledge of Te Kotahitanga or what they understand they want to be part of. So there is a huge chord there that resonates with so many people.

“But what I did say earlier this year was that I would go down and see Karen Sewell the, um, Secretary of Education, to see if she would give us some more funding, what I’ve always believed in is one fulltime teacher equivalent for each thousand students or something of that order, but something to acknowledge what we are doing. And I think we have to keep working for that. We were starting to get a rollover of principals and it seemed to me that that’s a very dangerous thing for a school. If you go five or six years with a principal who's involved in Te Kotahitanga, there is no way as a principal you can guarantee that the next principal, or that the Board, you know all of those things. Now Karen has said and I’m not sure Russell whether it’s come through or not but we will keep her to it, that for schools where the leadership changes, they will put a lot, they will put, they will extend the term out or they will bring those schools if they’ve gone out of it back onto some funding for a period of time. So there is to be some more money for that, now that was her words and she assured me it would happen. So, so it is only, I mean I have an awful feeling that means if my school wants money they might say to me, ‘It’s about time you resigned Annette.’

“But anyway there we are, that is it, just a couple of final things that I do want to say and that is, that I believe that education in New Zealand is coming of age. I believe we have a New Zealand way in education, and that New Zealand way is called Te Kotahitanga. Kia ora ngā tatau.”