Nei te mihi mahana e mihi kau ana ki a koutou katoa! Warm greetings to you all.
This blog was created to enable Cobham Intermediate to effectively and openly communicate to our school community what is happening in regards to some major changes that will be occurring at Cobham Intermediate School in the near future.
Cobham Intermediate is a big busy school in amongst a big busy education system, a system that is undergoing one of the most significant shifts in decades. Christchurch, post 22 February 2011, is leading the way in terms of this shift and change with $1 billion being spent in our schools over a 10 year period.
This, coupled with us as a school having a growth mindset, a focus on purposeful, meaningful and relevant change and ensuring that what we are doing is making a real difference for our students, means that there is a lot of thinking, discussing and developing going on. Which means there is a lot to keep up with.
This is why we have created innovation@C, an online space where we will keep you informed of all of our progress regarding curriculum, learning, teaching and school rebuild developments. This will include ideas, information, updates, research, videos, decisions, input from students, staff, whanau, local/national/international experts and opportunities to be involved. A one stop shop of all things Cobham as we collaboratively create New Zealand’s newest intermediate school.
NZ’s newest intermediate school? You will either know what I am talking about, or not at all! A five year summary in bullet points.
- The earthquakes of 2010 and 2011 led to the Christchurch Schools Rebuild Programme
- Through the Ministry of Education’s (MOE’s) assessments we were initially told that Cobham would be a near complete rebuild, if not a complete rebuild.
- As with all other Christchurch schools the previous capital works programme was suspended. This makes sense as there is no sense in upgrading buildings that are going to be demolished in the reasonably foreseeable future. Funds previously set aside for our school to address modernisation and weather tightness issues over time together with extra post-quake funds have been combined to enable this near or complete rebuild to take place as one project.
- All schools were placed into Learning Community Clusters…we were placed in the Burnside Learning Community Cluster (BLCC) along with Burnside Primary, Christ The King School, Fendalton Open Air School, Waimairi School and St Patricks Bryndwr. St Andrews College and Burnside High are now members of our cluster also, along with many kindergartens and pre-schools.
- All the schools in our initial cluster went through a Master Planning process…as a cluster of schools and individual schools.
- Burnside Primary School is being rebuilt as a new school.
- The MOE has confirmed that Cobham will be rebuilt as a new school.
- The MOE wants Cobham and Burnside Primary to co-locate on our combined neighbouring sites. They want us to share facilities and investigate opportunities around sharing resources and staffing.
- Allenvale Special School is also going to have provision on our combined sites - 3 learning spaces.
- Cobham and Burnside are on the rebuild programme for completion by the start of 2018. We are currently supposed to be in the detailed design phase, but have yet to be Master Planned for the second time. Warren and Mahoney have appointed as the architects to complete the master planning.
- The delay is due to the MOE and Cobham, together with the other intermediate schools in Chch, agreeing on a rebuild roll size number. It is hoped this will be sorted within the next 2 months.
- The board, leadership and whole staff have engaged in significant work with this. We have visited schools locally, in Auckland, Melbourne and the Gold Coast, and used the learnings from these together with research, our own ideas, discussions, debates,student/whanau voice and prototyping to complete our Education Brief for the MOE. This details our thinking for the architects and gives them a strong sense of the direction we wish to head and provides them with some clear principles to follow.
So, yes, there has been a bit going on!
We are very grateful to be given this opportunity and are excited about the work that lays ahead. But, we need to do it together with you and have designed innovation@C to be the conduit of information between us so we can stay connected, informed and a part of the process.
Our ultimate aim through this rebuild process? To engage more students, more often, in more ways. Surely that has to be a good thing right?
Thanks for joining us and stay tuned.
Scott Thelning
Principal
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