Ashburton College
PRINCIPAL – ROSS PREECE
AS PART OF OUR CONSTANT
desire to update ourselves and ensure that we are providing the educational foci for our community that is needed in the future, in 2020 we undertook a major overhaul of our key documents, including our Charter and Strategic Plan. This resulted in the changed image that you can see to the right of this article.
Our Mission Statement has not changed. However, as with any language, it is open to interpretation. The concept of ‘Individual Excellence’ to me means that we want our students to be the best they can be in all manner of fields. It might be that a child who has achieved Level 3 with Merit was capable of having achieved Excellence. In contrast, the student who takes two years to complete NCEA Level 1 may have exceeded all expectations. We want our students to excel and finish their time at Ashburton College with a sense of achievement. There is, of course, a huge range of opportunities at our college – be it leadership, academic, sporting or cultural. Our role is to ensure that the openings for individual excellence are presented in a variety of forms.
Our Vision is all about ensuring that our current learners will be prepared for a very different future to that which we have known, and we know that the world of future employment will be vastly different over the coming decades. There are some essential skills that will, however, be transferrable and applicable in the future. These are the ability to connect with others, to communicate clearly and particularly to have effective verbal communication, and also to be creative. Last year, with the disruption brought on by Covid, we got a small snapshot of how the world of work was forced to change and yet people adapted very quickly. Many of us were required to run enterprises and/or businesses via an online presence. However, co-operation and clear communication were still at the forefront.
As outlined in my first paragraph, the key change to these documents is the visual representation for Ashburton College. We chose the kete because it represents the intertwining of pathways that occur in our college. Our students come from different backgrounds and they interact and meet a wide range of people from our community. We considered many possible changes to prepare for the future and this interaction image is one new feature of those changes. We were, however, very strong in our desire to retain the House System and Colours which are well entrenched and a strength of Ashburton College. Thank you for your continued support.