Kia Aroha College

Our most exciting development is that we are now a Year 0-13 school! Our school is a community that offers a strong sense of whānau/family, in a learning approach that encourages the development of our students’ cultural identity and home languages, in two distinct ‘schools’ within the campus – Te Whānau o Tupuranga (Centre for Māori Education) and Fanau Pasifika (Centre for Pasifika Education). We believe our young people deserve the best of both worlds – high standards of academic achievement, together with the confidence and knowledge to become leaders in their own cultural settings and the wider community.

Our Learning model represents a 3-legged stool. If one of those legs is smaller than the other or is afforded more, or less time the stool will become unbalanced and topple over. Our Designated Character is what sits on top of our lens all bound by a critical pedagogy of Whanau.

Our learning model ensures that learning is negotiated, inquiry based, provides young people with the power to understand and challenge inequity. It is expected that we all work together and once we know something, we have a responsibility to share it with others. All done in critical, culturally sustaining ways.

It is important that during this time we don’t forget what makes our school unique and special. It is our intention to keep learning from our three lens.

We need to work hard so that we do not revert to acting and thinking in colonial ways. We need to ensure that we focus on all three of our learning lenses and don’t get caught thinking that the blue lens is the most important lens.

Kia Aroha College will not label reading, writing, maths or NCEA achievement as “Maori achievement” or “Pasifika achievement” – rather those outcomes will be identified as reading, writing and maths achievement (with nothing uniquely or specifically Maori or Pasifika about them). Our Graduate Profiles spell out specifically our wider cultural AND academic expectations for our learners. We believe our students have the right to expect our school to deliver both.

We respect the mana of each child and believe that “every individual is unique and they have their own time in which to know.” We will not expect therefore that all children will reach the same achievement at the same time simply on the basis of their age or year level. We will support each learner to realise their full potential in all aspects of learning and development and ensure our programme is differentiated on the basis of each learner’s specific abilities.