St Paul’s teacher Kerry Allen has been awarded the ‘WINTEC Secondary Science Teacher/Educator/Communicator Award’ at the 2017 Kudos Awards.
The award recognises a major contribution toward encouraging and promoting an understanding and appreciation of science to the Waikato wider community, including secondary school students.
Mrs Allen was nominated for the award by Deputy Headmaster Peter Hampton for her involvement in the development of NCEA Levels 2 and 3 Agribusiness achievement standards for New Zealand schools. She was a finalist alongside John Roche from DairyNZ.
Mrs Allen is the school’s Agribusiness Project Curriculum Director. She was employed by St Paul’s in 2014 to help create and develop the school’s agribusiness teaching and learning programme. Together with Headmaster Grant Lander and Mr Hampton, Mrs Allen successfully established partnerships with a range of key businesses and organisations from the agribusiness sector to develop a secondary school programme that was sector driven.
“With Kerry as lead writer, we have developed a highly academic Agribusiness programme for secondary schools that will help meet the industry’s long term needs to develop highly skilled and motivated young people, required for a sustainable future of the primary sector,” says Mr Hampton.
“This is a pioneering programme of national significance and has been recognised in political circles as an exciting and essential component of meeting our country’s future economic aspirations,” he says.
This year the Ministry of Education has approved ten New Zealand secondary schools to trial the draft NCEA Agribusiness achievement standards, and from 2018 the new standards will become available to all New Zealand schools.
“It is Kerry who has done most of the hard yards in terms of writing and resourcing the standards. This is an outstanding accomplishment and forms the basis of why I nominated her for this award,” says Mr Hampton.
The 11th annual awards dinner took place last night at Hamilton’s Claudelands Events Centre. The Kudos Awards are Hamilton and the Waikato’s prestigious Science Excellence awards that draw together the region’s finest innovators and science minds to celebrate world-class science discovery, innovation and research. For more information about the 2017 Kudos Awards, visit the Kudos Awards website.
Photo Credit: Stephen Barker Photography
