Welcome back to the start of the 2016-17 school year. We hope that you have all had a good and relaxing summer, filled with plenty of quality time with family and friends. We are excited to be starting another school year and look forward to continued accounts of our students striving to achieve their personal best across many areas of school life.
As ever, the summer has been a busy one at Mulgrave. The start of the season saw our Grade 12 students receive their IB diploma results, and we were delighted to see so many students hitting and surpassing their predicted scores and securing their selected university places. At a whole school level, the Class of 2016 were able to push a number of indicators to record levels, including the highest percentage of students to attain 40+ points in the school's history and the highest average diploma score. Our scores are now becoming comparable to some of the world's top performing international schools against whom we increasingly benchmark. We would like to congratulate all of the students, parents and teachers who were involved in helping and supporting the Class of 2016 to achieve such commendable results, both in the IB Diploma and the BC graduation diploma.
Our Mulgrave summer programmes were more popular than ever with hundreds of students of all ages enjoying a very wide range of activities. Congratulations to Nicola Ferguson (now Read) and her team on some great summer learning and fun activities. Congratulations, too, to our Upper School students who took part in the Kenya service trip for two weeks in July.
Within Mulgrave, our administration and facilities teams have been busy getting the school ready for the new year. We have made some significant upgrades to the JS and MS hallways, revamped the Upper School Learning Support Centre, and completed the new Board/Archive room, along with other minor changes.
At the start of the year, we welcome a good number of new teachers and associate teachers along with a few new admin staff. We had very few full time, permanent staff leave us at the end of last year, so the rather long list of new staff is a result of replacing temporary staff and creating new positions to deliver on some key aspects of our new strategic plan. You will shortly be receiving a hard copy of a brochure outlining the key goals of the strategic plan. When the dust has settled on the new term, we will be holding a series of information sessions about the plan that we hope you will be able to attend. We are excited to share our plans for the further development of education at our school.
In the coming weeks, we will be sending out a questionnaire for parents about the school calendar to get your feedback about the impact of the changes we introduced in 2015. In addition, in early October we will be hosting fifteen evaluators from the Council of International Schools and the International Baccalaureate Organisation who will be conducting a very thorough evaluation of Mulgrave. We will be measured against stringent international standards to judge the quality of the Mulgrave provision across all areas of school life. We will, of course, share the results with you.
This year promises to be another wonderful year for our school and we look forward to joining with you to ensure every unique young person is inspired to be the best they can be - in education and life.
Yours truly,
Harry Wierenga, Chair of the Mulgrave Board of Directors
John Wray, Head of School