Ao Tawhiti Unlimited Discovery, Christchurch | Fees, Address, Admission, Vacancies, Reviews & More

This school is great, it provides challenging and efficient classes on a solid schedule. Ao Tawhiti provides resources for students to start their NCEA journey years early.
The students who have the discipline to work hard to achieve their goals can come out of the school with excellent endorsements at level 3, THREE YEARS early. Compared to other schools, this level of progress is unavailable.

However, people that join this school need to push themselves for their own goals and successful academics.
Theres many students that put a bad rep for the school because they choose to do nothing and put little to no effort into their academics. The passing rate is low, but most of the ones that do succeed, succeed well.
This school could push more students to start NCEA and hard work early, but they leave students on a more self directed path, which works for some, but can turn into a huge waste of time for others. There needs to be more deadlines and some HBLAs (Teachers) need to push students further towards their careers.
Walk into school and expect to see 20% of people working hard, and 80% of people hardly working. The school is very self directed, and don’t get me wrong. The people that can use their time efficiently will do very well.
If you are thinking about sending your child to this school, make sure they are motivated towards their subjects and goals, and if they can use their time well, it should be perfect.

Used to go here, it was amazing at the old primary site when it was still Discovery 1. But as soon as it moved into town it started to go south. I hate open plan, can’t focus, wayy too noisy, not built for the you get kids only the high school kids, looks flashy but isn’t super functional. Enjoyed my time here but glad I decided to leave.

Good school but if you do not go to class David Seymour come to your house FBI style but since I go to class I’m over halfway to level 1 at year 10 so if you want to learn this school is good
just make sure you go to class

While kids are young this school may assist learning while challenging kids creativity and independence. You need to know however when’s right to pull the parachute and get them out when they can no longer stay engaged on their own.

Just don’t expect any teachers or staff to inform you when your kids been disengaged all year spending 90% of their time on iPads and non-academic activity. Also expect that they will be 2-3 years behind (worse in both my kids cases) when trying to fit them into traditional schools.

The schools ideology is sound, however as is the case with much ideology the execution is missing. Key checks and balances and more regular testing are urgently needed, particularly with literacy. Kids as they grow also need accountability to their term IEM goals with much more “path guidance” to ensure the goals are aligned to things we should be doing at school time (academic or career focused goals), and don’t result in kids just mucking around.

This school is great if you don’t work well with the structured, all NCEA focused, year level based way of learning regular schools use and want to pursue other passions than NCEA.

This school is also great if you have the knowledge, skills, and drive to start NCEA before year 11.

Beware this school does require a higher level of self control and planning because you choose what NCEA opportunities to persue and passing NCEA won’t be a given if you don’t plan and track your NCEA to certain extent.

Also parents need to more involved as they will most likely have to help their child plan their learning and NCEA progress.

As a student of Aotawhiti I think if you have the knowledge, drive, and self control you will leave school better prepared for the less straight forward and structured environments of university and work.