Principal's Message

On Monday the College held it's annual athletics sports day at the Caledonian. The brilliant run of summer weather made for a great event with plenty of individual and team highlights. Thanks to the sports department for the great organisation and our whole staff who put in a lot of work to make the day a success.

As the term is now well underway classes overall are quite settled. Our new entrants, particularly at Year 7, have picked up the Kavanagh baton superbly and senior students have successfully engaged with their options for the year. 

One of the strengths of Kavanagh College is empowering students to broadly develop their range of skills and interests. Keeping a balanced and healthy mindset as well as finding enjoyment in their learning process is key across all dimensions of academic, sport, culture, spiritual and social engagement. Underpinning this are things like resilience as well as perseverance when things get tough. Success at school has to project out to success for life and for different students their idea of success may not always be in sinc with what society narrowly deems as successful (good education equals good job equals good money equals spending power equals happiness). Often schools gear to short term success or quick wins that look good but may not deliver in the long term. 

I mention this as I'm often asked why Kavanagh's scholarship examination results are relatively lower compared to other school's in the region. The simple answer is we allow all students the opportunity to sit the highest level examination in Year 13 and certainly encourage those that we deem able enough to tackle this challenge on top of their NCEA program, but it is not the key focus.

A number of school's gear their senior levels with the specific aim of producing scholarships. For example top academic student's may skip Level 1 NCEA and go straight to Level 2. They then sit NCEA Level 3 in Year 12 leaving their final Year 13 as a mostly scholarship exam focus. This works well in terms of results and the optics are certainly good for the school in terms of numbers of passes, however, I am not convinced that this necessarily benefits every student that is funneled down this chute. Given some of our poor stats around NZ student well-being this type of approach may actually do more harm than good and not every student, even the most academically able, is cut out for it. 

This year Kavanagh had two students from 2018 who achieved scholarship exam passes in physics and calculus, arguably the two toughest subjects in the scholarship regimen. Moreover almost 80% of Kavanagh students go on to tertiary study, mostly here in Otago, in a range of areas from health sciences to law, business, philosophy, nursing and teaching. We also produce great citizens for the workforce and vocational or trades areas. The feedback we get from employers and universities about our young people is exceptional, regarding their abilities but in particular their personal qualities. I'm often asked, "Do you have anymore like her/him?" Answer: "Absolutely." In short, the scholarship exam has some value and targeting a few more in the annual plan is a worthy goal but not the be all and end all as a future measure of success.

As we approach the lentern season it is a good time to reflect on the things we take for granted and give thanks to God for all the goodness and abundance that is in our lives. A good place to start is to prayerfully thank those in our lives who support, nurture and sustain us. Who is that for you? Lord hear our prayer.