Combined Secondary Schools’ Principals’ Conference
Sunday 18 May 2003
Conference theme is The Learning Edge. Keynotes are on:
Improving Education for Maori, New Issues Requiring New Understandings
and The Leadership of Successful Change
Welcome to Christchurch
Christchurch is a city where a good deal of our success comes
from defining and meeting new challenges.
- Cite the challenge of
inner city decay a few years ago and how that was turned around
by finding new ways to use the central
city.
- Mention new cultural precinct with art gallery, arts centre,
museum and Hagley Park.
- Inner city property investment booming
as a result of clear, consistent signals.
- One of the key players
in this revival has of course been our education as a marketable
commodity.
- Cite how on trip to China in that hotel ballroom
where you got mobbed you realised for the first time in your
political
life what it was like to be truly popular and how valuable education
is in other cultures.
- How do we get that same passion afloat here?
- Christchurch the
original home of Project Early which has now finally gone national.
- I
don’t know what it takes to get this across. One dollar
spent on prevention now saves about $35 later down the line.
- Christchurch’s
Eastern suburbs had the courage to say we have to intervene,
we have to stop sentencing our young
to a life of crime and failure when we know most of what adds up
to that sentence can be turned around.
- It took courage, commitment
and at times cash from the Council to get that idea up, running
and credible.
- Delighted to say I helped on the funding front and
thrilled to see such common sense now spreading nationally.
- Christchurch,
a city where the bottom line is now triple bottom line.
- Cash
bottom line is not King, nor Queen in Christchurch.
- Our measure
is now the social, environmental and economic costs of our actions.
- Our
next step ahead as a city will be working out what Christchurch
needs to move ahead into a state of true prosperity of pocket and
spirit.
- We have already started to identify some of the key drivers
for moving toward this goal.
- Hugely high on the list is quality
education.
- It is a common good goal of huge importance to us all.
- Without
the basic skills of literacy and numeracy we cannot ever do more
than aspire to be a real knowledge economy.
- Without a sense of
real history and a corresponding sense of context our young will
be rudderless in their age.
- Without some shared set of values
our greatest asset in New Zealand, a strong sense of common good
and community will be eroded.
- Without coming to terms with our
bicultural foundations we will have huge problems becoming
truly multicultural.
- These are just some of the problems we face
in our schools, and our society.
- They are major.
- I also believe that they are problems we can
solve if we are all willing to work together out of the traditional
silos of role
and title of the past.
- Maybe a good way to do so would be to start with the common
good goal from one South American city that faced similar challenges.
- They
set a simple goal of having a city where every child was loved
and valued.
- Maybe we need to do the same.
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