Claire Sparks will join the Learning Centre department. As well as teaching literacy, Claire will also work alongside Shelly in numeracy and provide her with some much needed support in this very busy area. Finally, as I retire, I would like to thank College for providing me with a wonderful career. I have loved my role as Head of the Learning Centre and the boys have made this such a rewarding experience. They are clever, funny, loyal and brave, and they have taught me so much. It has also been wonderful to work alongside people who share my passion for helping every boy to be at his best, regardless of the challenges. I know I leave the department in very good hands. Lesley Anderson-McKenna HoD Learning Centre & ESOL LIBRARY This year marked the start of a new period for the library following the retirement of both long-term members of staff at the end of 2021. Our fresh team are both new to College – myself as Librarian and Libby Stevens as Library Assistant. We spent a lot of Term 1 getting to understand the library and its role within College before starting to meddle with things. However, we more than made up for it later in the year, trying lots of new ideas and aiming to have an agile approach to acting on suggestions from boys and staff.
Supporting and motivating students to read for pleasure was our major focus this year. This was informed by staff research into the relationship between reading and later life success, which showed that students who read for pleasure were better able to learn from written texts. This then enables their overall educational success. All our major projects and experiments focused on getting our students reading for pleasure more frequently and building a stronger culture of reading across the school. Our biggest success this year was the trialling of a House Reading competition to motivate the boys to read and reward those who do, both with individual prizes and a big prize for the winning House. It ran over the two winter terms, and rewarded students for reading books and writing reviews of what they had read. Over the competition, students submitted a total of 1039 books that they had read, with the boarding Houses taking a clean sweep of the top three places. Richards took out first place and won a large trophy of new books for their House library. Overall, the competition was a huge success and we believed it was a major contributor to total book issues from the library increasing 66% from 2021. The structure of the House Reading competition sparked our realisation that the school library staff were perfectly positioned to act as
supervisors for boys who wanted to use reading as a skill for their Duke of Edinburgh’s Hillary Award. This year, 11 boys have been working on, or completed, their award using reading, while supervised by library staff. They read books that challenged them, exposed them to new genres, and one student even successfully read books in multiple languages. We also contributed to the Duke of Edinburgh’s Hillary Award in an unexpected way by starting an afterschool Dungeons & Dragons group at the request of several students. We never realised when starting that tabletop role-playing games were a DoE recognised skill, but many boys made good use of it to get their Silver award this year. Playing Dungeons & Dragons has given students the opportunity to learn a wide range of soft skills like empathy, leadership and creative problem-solving ,and has taught them that even the best- laid plans will go awry. We also started two experiments with boarding Houses to try to increase accessibility of books in different ways. These are both continuing to be observed and evaluated before possibly being rolled out to all boarding Houses next year. With Richards House, we are testing the impact of getting all of the students public library cards so they can access the full selection of ebooks and audiobooks the public library offers. Years 9–10 students in Richards also got a behind-the-scenes tour of Tu¯ranga, including time to experiment in the recording studio and play on the gaming equipment. The second trial involves having a selection of our main library’s collection moved into the School House library so that students have easy access to recreational reading right in their home. Another first for College was having a team enter the Year 9 Readers’ Cup, a national reading competition. Our team of Oscar Stove, Charlie de Costobadie, Michael Rankin, Bill Cross, and Tate Aikawa, earned a respectable 4th place in the Canterbury round of the competition. They left the competition energised
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