Brilliant Bobcats

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A big congratulations to the Beckenham Bobcats who were placed 2nd in the C grade basketball competition at Pioneer. They put their bodies on the line and gave it their all!



Cantamaths & Basketball

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Hi Everyone! The past few weeks the Pōhutukawa Whānau have been busy, busy, busy! The children have had some awesome learning opportunities lately that have challenged and encouraged them to work together. Everyone has been doing an outstanding job of working hard in their learning and upholding our schools values. Here is a little bit about some of the things we have been doing at Beckenham School.

Cantamaths

Some of our brilliant mathematicians were given the opportunity to compete in the Cantamaths Year 6 Problem Solving Challenge this year. These children spent weeks calculating and creating these projects based off a problem presented to them by Cantamaths and you can see below just impressive the final products were! We are so proud of how hard these children worked and want to give a big shout out to Alex and Hannah who managed to score an excellence, the top honour in Cantamaths. Ka pai Alex and Hannah!

Basketball

On Friday we were lucky enough to have a year 5/6 team from Somerfield School visit us during lunchtime to play a game of basketball against our own team. All players from both schools played extremely well and our audience cheered hard for both teams. It was a fun and exhilarating atmosphere with Beckenham getting the win 18-5. We are looking forward to the possibility of visiting Somerfield School next term for another rematch. Until then... GO BECKENHAM!

Sporting highs and lows on Friday.

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Well done to the Year 8 football team who took on the staff today. Brilliance was seen from both teams, with a one all score at full time. In the penalty shoot-out the staff pulled ahead by one.

After school the Bandits, our top basketball team, played their final game of the season at Pioneer Stadium, playing for third place in B grade against the South Steelers. If was a close game, with the Bandits playing particularly well on defence. The final score was 9:7 to Beckenham. Thanks to all those who turned up to support the team.


Term 3, Week 6 Newsletter

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Cricket
Next week (Tuesday September 1st), the Christchurch Metro Cricket Association will be sending coaches out to Beckenham School to run 30 minute coaching sessions with our hubs. This will be a fantastic way of learning some cricket skills from the professionals.  These sessions will run outdoors if the weather is fine, and indoors if the weather is wet.  We look forward to their visit and hope the weather is nice!
Please remember to send your child along to school with appropriate sport shoes and clothing.

Gymnastics
A reminder to all families that gymnastics is now finished.  The children have thoroughly enjoyed these activities and we have noticed budding gymnasts practicing their moves in the playground!  Thank you to all the parents/caregivers for your support, and for ensuring that your children came to school wearing appropriate footwear/clothing.

New learning topic
Next week is week 7, time is flying by!  Our learning will be moving on, and the next topic we will focus on will be MLE’s.
As you will be aware Beckenham School’s classrooms will soon transform and transition into a MLE (Modern Learning Environment).  Therefore, our focus with the children will be to develop their understandings around the internal and external spaces in which they will be learning.  We will do this by encouraging the children to work collaboratively as we think about our future learning spaces.

Learning Conferences
A big thank you to all those parents/caregivers that attended their child’s learning conference this week.  It was a valuable way to share learning progress with you, and it was encouraging to see so many families attend.  If you haven’t organised a Learning Conference yet, please contact your teacher and we can make a time to meet before or after school to do this.

Back to the Beginning…

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Welcome to the Beckenham School Rebuild blog.  

The Board and I have been concerned for quite a while on how we were going to keep the school community in the loop with everything that is going on with the proposed rebuild. Hence this blog to provide a communication vehicle.

One of the biggest challenges is often we don’t have much to report, so how do you say nothing! We've decided that it’s better to tell you that there is nothing to tell rather than not telling you at all. I can at least let you know when I’ve attended meetings (and I can promise you over the last year there have been many!).

So lets go 'Back to the Beginning' and look at the Timeline so far:

  • October 2011 - Following the Sept 2010 and Feb 2011 earthquakes, the Ministry of Education announced an an engagement process to develop a draft Education Renewal Recovery Plan to guide the future shape of education in greater Christchurch.
  • September 2012 - Minister Parata announced the new landscape for Greater Christchurch Schools - being put into Clusters, and the plan to rebuild, close or merge a number of schools. As a part of this announcement, Beckenham School was placed in the St Martins Cluster (since renamed as the Ōpāwaho Learning Community Cluster) along with the following schools: St Martins, Ōpāwa, Waltham, St Peters Beckenham, St Marks, Hillview Christian, Christchurch Rudolf Steiner, te Kura Kaupapa Māori o Waitaha
  • April 2013 - Ōpāwaho Cluster were one of the first Chch clusters to begin the process of Master Planning (as a cluster). Lorraine Moss from the MOE was appointed as our Cluster Case Manager. Jasmax architects were appointed and the Master Planning process happened over the next few months. Many meetings were held with the school, including the BOT to work through this process. It is our understanding that this Master plan was never signed off as completed by the MOE, due to issues around cost, among other things. At this stage, it was still a theoretical exercise, in that no schools had any indication of the time-frame for the delivery of this work. The budget was unclear and no confirmation could be given around the continued place of the Ferndale Satellite class at Beckenham.

  • June 2013 - Murray Humm appointed as Beckenham School Property Manager at MOE (taking over from Peter Fenwick
  • November 2013 - Hon Minister Parata announced the programme to invest $1.137 billion on renewing schools infrastructure in Greater Christchurch. This programme indicated that Beckenham School's work would be completed in Term 4 2016, and would come into the category of "Major Redevelopment: Work typically over $5m or of a complex nature. Aims for a comprehensive upgrade of teaching spaces to core modern learning environment standards."
(This time-frame was clearly very tight, and from a teaching perspective, required us to immediately and rapidly move to shift our practice to a more flexible and collaborative model than single-cell classrooms from the 19th century would naturally provide.)
  • November 2013 - Following the Minister's announcement the Board of Trustees agreed to begin prototyping with our current building stock, to enable the physical breaking down of barriers between existing classroom spaces. The first space to be 'opened up' was the Intermediate Hub, followed over the next 18 months by R14/15, R10/11, R21/22, R5/6 and R3/4.
  • During 2014 and 2015, our school focus has been, and continues to be, developing robust collaborative teaching practices.
  • August -October 2014 - We formally enter the CSR programme with the procurement and appointment of a Project Manager: Tess Browne at TBIG (The Building Intelligence Group). (Tess is also appointed as Cashmere Primary School's project manager - the two schools are being worked as a 'bundle' for procurement purposes by the MOE)
  • October and November 2014 We held two Whānau Hui at school to understand better what our families are looking for in terms of the experiences, values and competencies that they want their children to have during their time at Beckenham School. 
  • November 2014 - MOE confirmed that two satellite classes of Ferndale School would be built as part of the Beckenham rebuild programme and dedicated funds for that project would be added to the original budget.
  • January 2015 - Vikanda Bagrie appointed as MOE Property Delivery Manager -(taking over from Lorraine Moss and Murray Humm) 
  • January/February 2015 - Design Team procurement process undertaken by MOE for Beckenham and Cashmere Primary and team of Stevenson & Turner / Hayball appointed.
  • February 2015 - Pulling together information from the two hui, our school documentation and developing collaborative teaching idealogy from many staff meetings during 2014, I produced, with the support of our then assigned CSR project manager Lorraine Moss, a Project Brief which was sent to the Ministry of Education to inform the design process.
  • February 2015 - First on-site meeting with the newly appointed architect and landscape designer
  • February - April 2015 - Review of original master plan, resulting in a new master plan being drawn up. 
  • May 2015 - Master plan submitted to MOE Design Review Panel. (not yet released by MOE for publication)
  • June - July 2015 - Whilst waiting for the confirmation of the Master Plan review, the design team have been beginning to move into the concept design stage. The architect has continued to visit the school on numerous occasions and has also met with groups of students and staff to talk through ideas.
If you would like to read more information on the Christchurch Schools Rebuild (CSR) programme, there is a regional webpage that has all the background and a quarterly newsletter is also produced which is worth reading. The current edition shows a timeline - Beckenham School is between the Master Planning Phase and the Concept Design Phase. (It is worth noting that, due to our early place in the CSR programme, many of the detailed timelines, frameworks and support packages being developed by the MOE are still being put together).





Naturally a rebuild means some demolition and then building work begins and I know that many of you might be wondering what this means for you and your children and when will I be able to give you some dates and plans.

I want to share as much as possible with you. As this is a Ministry of Education project I have to respect the commercial processes that need to be followed and can only release information as they allow us to. Clearly, we are working to a tight time-frame and there is much to be organised as we proceed.

I’ll be in touch again very soon!

Sandy