Auckland principals are confident this week s lockdown will have little impact on children s learning - as long as it is only for three days.
Rowandale School principal Karl Vasau says the community appears to be better prepared for dealing with the latest lockdown.
Photo: Supplied
About 250,000 school students are learning from home for the duration of alert level 3 and principals have said some would find a longer lockdown difficult, because they did not have internet connections at home.
They said the fact the lockdown was happening so early in the year presented its own challenges.
Albany Senior High School principal Claire Amos said the school started the year with a plan for dealing with another lockdown but Sunday s announcement was still a shock.
Secondary Principals’ Association of New Zealand (SPANZ) president Deidre Shea said schools are ready for 2021. “We are all ready and raring to go. The start of the school year is always a wonderful time to reconnect with students and their families. “This has been helped by a beautiful summer, so we are generally looking forward to reconnecting.”
BRADEN FASTIER / STUFF
Some parents are struggling to meet the costs of outfitting their children for the new school year. (Video first published January 2019) Shea, also principal of Auckland’s Onehunga High School, said she very much hoped there would not be a third lockdown, although schools had “all the material behind us ready to go”.
NCEA results are out and it appears most teenagers overcame the disruption of the pandemic and did well in the national qualification.
It appeared more students had achieved their NCEA certificate through internal assessment before they sat their exams, Education Minister Chris Hipkins said. File photo
Photo: 123RF
Education Minister Chris Hipkins said the provisional 2020 results were similar to previous years and in some cases slightly better.
That s despite the national and Auckland lockdowns robbing schools of weeks of classroom time.
Hipkins said he was especially pleased that level 3 results for school-leavers had improved.
It appeared more students had achieved their NCEA certificate through internal assessment before they sat their exams, but it was not yet clear how the results were influenced by extra learning recognition credits awarded to students last year, he said.