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:
“Part way back from Bedlam
I came to my mother’s house in Gloucester,
Massachusetts. And this is how I came
to catch at her; and this is how I lost her.
I cannot forgive your suicide, my mother said.
And she never could.”
—Anne Sexton (1928–1974)
“Justice in the hands of the powerful is merely a governing system like any other. Why call it justice? Let us rather call it injustice, but of a sly effective order, based entirely on cruel knowledge of the resistance of the weak, their capacity for pain, humiliation and misery. Injustice sustained at the exact degree of necessary tension to turn the cogs of the huge machine-for- the-making-of-rich-men, without bursting the boiler.”
—Georges Bernanos (1888–1948)