Lockdown ‘ups ante’ for Dykes
Switching as principal from one high school to another midyear was always going to be a challenge, the new headmaster of Nelson College says.
Add in the Covid-19 lockdown and you got a situation that ‘‘completely upped the ante’’, Richard Dykes said.
While school staff across the country had done a ‘‘stunning job’’ with online learning during lockdown, it was ‘‘not as good as face-toface’’ schooling, he said.
‘‘That’s really raised the anxiety amongst year 13s as to; will I be able to get the qualifications; will I be able to go to university?
‘‘We’ve just got to be really brutal this year. The academic success of our students, and making sure that they can move on to whatever they want to, that’s got to be our focus.’’
Students’ academic progress was second only to the wellbeing of staff and students, said Dykes, one week into the job.
Individual education plans would be drawn up with each student at Nelson College, identifying their targets, and how to reach them.
‘‘We’ve just got to be really brutal this year.’’ Richard Dykes
Dykes attended all boys’ school, Auckland Grammar, as a student, but it was his first time working at a single-sex school.
Having left as principal at co-ed school, Glendowie College in Auckland, to take up the new role, his approach would be fundamentally the same, he said.
‘‘I want our young men in the community to come here and parents to send their boys here because they know it’s safe, because they’ve got fantastic opportunities and because they’re going to get a great academic education.’’
To any parents of boys in central Nelson concerned that Nelson College would soon become their only option, he said Nelson College was a ‘‘great school’’.
The concerns arose after the only co-ed in Nelson city, Nayland College, said it planned to implement an enrolment zone sometime next year.
‘‘I hope that we can meet the needs of every student who comes in our door,’’ Dyke said.
‘‘Nelson College historically is one on the most progressive and innovative schools, I’m talking over the last 150 years.’’
Nelson College headmaster
He hoped for collaboration between Nelson College and Nelson College for Girls, which previously shared some lessons for senior students.
‘‘Obviously the girls’ college and the boys’ college, it makes sense for us to be working together.
‘‘How that looks, that’s a conversation for [principal] Cathy [Ewing], and me to have.’’
Dykes wanted to meet people and learn the ‘‘lay of the land’’ before ‘‘rushing into changes’’, or before building a vision for the school.
Time spent in Canada, as part of a sabbatical with Woolf Fisher Fellowship last year, highlighted the need to increase trust within the education system in New Zealand, he said.
‘‘Competing to get students from each other, no-one wins out of that,’’ said Dykes, who was also previously head of department for business studies at Waimea College in Richmond, near Nelson, before teaching at high schools in Taupo and Auckland.
He would not say if a cellphone ban for students at Glendowie College brought in at the end of 2019 would be replicated at Nelson College.
‘‘It was one of the best decisions that we made at that school.’’