Our School
Our school beliefs are expressed in the school mottos - Aim to excel / Whaia te iti kahurangi. We translate the Maori to mean ‘Be the best you can be’, though this is open to other interpretations as well. The Maori version comes from the proverb “Whaia te iti kahurangi. Ki te touhou koe maunga teitei”. Pursue excellence and if you must bow your head, bow it only to the highest mountain.
Four Elements of Our Culture
The Promotion of Individual Excellence
We work hard at promoting and celebrating the highest levels of achievement by staff and students. For staff this means high standards of professionalism and a willingness to do whatever it takes to enable students to do their best and to build on a long standing culture of success in the school. For pupils it means that they understand they do have the ability to succeed at the highest level because year by year, they are provided with role models who do just that.
Excellence in all fields is recognised and rewarded, and we target examination results, particularly scholarship, but also national academic competitions, cultural festivals and inter-school sporting competitions as indicators. We also value the gains made by many of our students requiring remedial attention. Even though they do not make it to academic honours, most work hard to be the best they can be and make considerable personal academic gains.
The Provision of Opportunity, Choice and Balance
While the core value for pupils is “Achievement at the highest level”, for staff it is “Providing every pupil with every opportunity to succeed”. The provision of a broad range of subjects is a key element in our curriculum delivery and pupils are encouraged to exercise a wide degree of choice in subject selection.
We offer a range of learning opportunities to cater for all academic levels. We timetable an extension and an accelerate programme, operate a very effective assisted learning programme which deals with a whole range of learning needs, provide ESOL and remedial programmes and tutorials specialising in examination preparation.
Aim to Excel / Whaia te iti kahurangi applies as much to extra-curricular activities as it does to classroom work. Students not only have a wide range of cultural and sporting opportunities, they are also motivated by the school’s expectation that they excel in these, evidenced by high quality individual and team/group performances across a wide variety of activities. These provide balance to the academic priority within the same culture of high achievement.
A Belief in Inclusiveness
We are a community school. We cater for a wide range of abilities in our pupils, hence the academic and cultural/sporting programmes mentioned above, the Special Needs Unit, and school programmes which provide for a range of students with different interests and abilities.
HNHS prides itself on an effective pastoral and guidance network which underpins our ability to develop a meaningful programme for all of our students. Within reason we accept and value difference and do not demand absolute conformity as the price of success.
A Long Term View of Success
We look further than the school gate in our plan for students. HNHS does not simply prepare students for the process of achieving NCEA or other qualifications, although our results show we do this very well. We look to produce good citizens who are not only academically qualified, but confident and capable of making their way in the outside world.
We believe that when our pupils leave us having learned to be responsible, respectful, hardworking, creative and having achieved their personal best, then we will have done our job well.
The glue which binds all of what we do together is the house system, the pastoral network and the professionalism of staff who share a real pride in the achievements of their students and their colleagues.
We aim to finish at the top of any measure of school achievement though we recognise that these measures are often subjective. We aim to win or to perform at the highest levels of achievement in everything we do.
