Bream Bay College receives a long-awaited facelift

Students, whānau and staff celebrating the opening of the new buildings at Bream Bay College.

Bream Bay College’s new classrooms and a refurbished learning support area replace almost half of the school’s buildings.

The project took around eight years of planning and building the classrooms at a cost of about $7.5 million.

The new buildings opened yesterday and include a six-classroom block for Years 7 and 8 and a four-classroom block for sciences and labs. There’s also a refurbished and reconfigured learning support area.

The art is illuminated in the morning light. Photo / supplied

The Year 7-8 lab – ‘Te Wao Nui ā Tane’ – celebrates the forest as being vital to life. Outside the building, forest bird life art is featured.

This block is an Innovative Learning Environment (ILE) which can evolve and adapt to student or teacher needs. In this case, the classrooms each open up into other spaces.

The classrooms were blessed by Kit Singleton and Wayne Buckland.

The science block – ‘Ngā kaitiaki o te Moana’– translates to ‘guardians of the ocean’, and explores the ideas of preservation, conservation, repair and utilisation of environments for the present and future generations. The exterior of the building features sea birds.

State-of-the-art furniture featured within the classrooms includes couches, round tables, high tables and whiteboard tables.

Principal Wayne Buckland said Bream Bay College was a deep-learning school with a focus on collaboration, citizenship, compassion and more and that the new buildings allowed for that style of teaching.

“They are good spaces for problem-solving and collaboration,” he said.

The new classrooms are an innovative learning environment which allows teachers and students to adapt to their own needs.

Buckland said kaiako (teachers) have noted the new buildings have brought a “sense of calm” for students that has become a space they want to learn in.

“The enthusiasm from them [students] to be in there and learn. All the teachers are saying they’re so calm.

“It’s just so exciting to see the students in there and the teachers in there taking advantage of the spaces,” he said.

Physical arrangements for the build began at the beginning of 2020. Three years later, the school can finally utilise its new learning spaces.

Buckland said the school chose to host the official openings before he retired after 22 years as principal at the college. He will be replaced by Julian Cosgrove.

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