Welcome to our 34th Annual Conference
6th – 9th June 2024

From “Re-setting the education agenda” of last year’s conference to “Being the change we want for today and tomorrow” for this. 

School boards make an enormous contribution to all our kura in Aotearoa.  The strength of school governance lies in the fact that schools work under the strategic guidance of members of their own communities, including parents, professional people and others who are able to contribute relevant skills and expertise.

Through quality governance we can continue to assist in shaping the future for our children of today and beyond but, we need to be relentless, we need to be determined, we need to be courageous.  Our children, our future, deserve no less. 

This year, we ask you to rise above the noise of today, to find the traction needed to keep us from slipping, To tie us all together to make sure no-one falls, and to ensure we keep heading in the right direction. 

As boards we need to concentrate on how we can support and challenge each other, our principal and staff and our whole school community to strive for excellence in everything we do, especially for and on behalf of our students.  Governing our schools really well doesn’t just mean doing okay by eighty percent of the students. Or ninety. It’s a good start – but we need to aim higher. We need to help every student, every member of our staff to face their Everest, and conquer it. And to do that we lead by example. We face up to the hard stuff, we deal with it and we move on. 

We lead the world in our commitment to community involvement in our children’s schooling. As school boards, we can be proud of the part that we, and the people who’ve come before us over the past 34 years, have had in making that work. One of the changes we have been part of in that time is the increasing focus on the fact that schools are about students. It’s the ability to make a positive change in their lives that motivates us, and the quality of their work that indicates whether we’ve succeeded. 

I will continue to remind us all that there is a song at the heart of every school. Each one is a song about hope and opportunity; about the joy of learning and growing and becoming better; about nourishing the treasure that our children and young people can and will be. The song can all too often be drowned out by the noise of day-to-day school life. As trustees, we are the guardians of our school’s heart song. It is our task to know the song in the heart of our school and to sing it back when others forget how it goes.  We do that by knowing why we are there and keeping focussed not just on how and when we do things, but why we do them, and whether we might do them better.  The result is a firm, shared commitment to creating an excellent school, with staff who excel at the work they do, with students who excel at being all they can be, whether academically or ethically; physically, emotionally, or socially. However well we have done so far, we remind each other that there is always more we can do. When school boards do this well, our schools thrive, and so do our students and the things they can achieve.