House System
Upon entry to the School, each student is allocated, according to age and gender, or family tradition, to one of the four houses:
- Hunter (green) – named after John Hunter
- Macquarie (red) – named after Lachlan Macquarie
- Shortland (yellow) – named after John Shortland
- Tyrrell (sky blue) – named after Bishop Tyrrell.
Houses form the basis for sporting and cultural competitions or interactions within the school, including:
- debating
- music festival
- cross country (years 2–12)
- swimming carnivals
- athletics carnivals.
The house system also facilitates the pastoral care programme of the senior school. Students in each house are placed in a single-sex, mixed age group led by one a mentor teacher, and they remain with this group throughout their senior school years. Mentor groups meet twice each week and also sit together in assembly and chapel service. The mentor teacher and house patron work together to encourage and support each student in the House, and the house patron and student leaders are responsible for organising sporting teams for inter-house competitions as well as fund-raising activities, and various inter-house events. Each house is responsible for organising one themed chapel service annually, and sponsoring an activity for the Spring Fair.
Read more about this topic: Newcastle Grammar School
Famous quotes containing the words house and/or system:
“Science is built up with facts, as a house is with stones. But a collection of facts is no more a science than a heap of stones is a house.”
—Jules Henri Poincare (1854–1912)
“We recognize caste in dogs because we rank ourselves by the familiar dog system, a ladderlike social arrangement wherein one individual outranks all others, the next outranks all but the first, and so on down the hierarchy. But the cat system is more like a wheel, with a high-ranking cat at the hub and the others arranged around the rim, all reluctantly acknowledging the superiority of the despot but not necessarily measuring themselves against one another.”
—Elizabeth Marshall Thomas. “Strong and Sensitive Cats,” Atlantic Monthly (July 1994)