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Business Partners Quarterly Update
June 2023
Kia ora koutou Business Partners
Welcome to our second NZPF Business Partners’ Update for 2023. Our work continues, at pace, to focus on our four strategic areas of leadership, curriculum, learning support (inclusive education) and policy. I will talk more about those in our next update. Today, I want to explain the ways you contribute to our work and especially the way you help us make our conferences accessible to more principals.
Your financial contributions have substantially changed access to our annual conference, especially for those principals in smaller, rural, and isolated schools. These are the schools with less financial capability to support their principal to attend conferences.
You enable us to support these principals through NZPF special grants. We have expanded our Don Le Prou grants for U 1-3 schools, which include sole charge schools, and schools with fewer than 200 students. Don Le Prou was President of NZPF in our very early years and was principal of Frankton School in Hamilton. He was a strident advocate for equity and recognized the difficulties for small and rural principals trying to access professional learning through attending conferences.
We have also introduced the Tauri Morgan Memorial grant for U4 and larger schools. Tauri was the NZPF Kaumatua for many years and principal of Waiouru School. He was well known as a principal who could walk in both Te Āo Māori and the pākehā world and was astute at building bridges between the two. He particularly advocated for Māori principals to have greater access to professional development. After his death NZPF, with the good will of Tauri’s family, set up a memorial grant in his name.
The NZPF national executive has more than trebled the funds available for these grants in the last five years, through your contributions. As the number of our conference delegates grows, so does the conference surplus, allowing us to continue expanding the number of successful applications for these grants.
Your partnership with NZPF is making a substantial difference to equalizing the professional learning opportunities for principals leading our smaller schools and we thank you on their behalf.
Right now, we are preparing a bid to host the International Confederation of Principals (ICP) conference in Auckland in 2026. Our President, Leanne Otene, will be travelling to the ICP conference in Finnish Lapland in September to present our bid which we hope will be successful. Should we succeed, there will be several sponsorship opportunities for you, our business partners. So, watch this space!
Nga manaakitanga
Shane Buckner
Business Partners Team
NZPF
NZPF assures its business partners that, as members, you will contact them to have a conversation if you are purchasing products, services or solutions for your schools that a business partner supplies. Please support our partners as their assistance to NZPF means better membership services to you.
