The headmaster of one of New Zealand’s most prestigious schools says the buzzword “resilience” has become a cliche and students need to be taught to toughen up, amid new reports some Christchurch students will be allowed to study from home.  

Christchurch’s Hagley College hopes to help students struggling with attendance due to extracurricular activities or sickness and mental health concerns by giving 20 NCEA Level 2 students the choice of part-time studying from home in a new trial.  

That would involve them doing three days of in-person learning at school - including 16 hours of English, maths, and science - and two days of learning through video calls.  

Auckland Grammar headmaster Tim O’Connor says he backed each school to make their own choices but in his view students needed to show up to class, in-person, five-days a week. 

Turning up at the right place at the right time, being professional and learning how to socialise with peers were life lessons everyone needed to learn, he told Kerre Woodham on Newstalk ZB. 

If anxious students stay at home all the time rather than being given the tools to cope, our nation is in for a “sad future”, he said. 

“I’m over resilience, I think resilience is now a cliche and we actually need to be teaching them to be less fragile,” he said. 

“It does seem to me that the society we’re living in is too readily accepting of every well-being measure possible.” 

“Why don’t we just go back to the basics with them and say: ‘Hey, no, you need to be present. You need to be doing these things, these things aren’t up for negotiation, you just need to be at the right place at the right time.’” 

Christchurch's Hagley College hopes its new part-time study from home trial is an innovative way to help students. Photo / Supplied 

Host Woodham claimed she had heard some parents complain they can’t “drag” or “bribe” their kids to attend school because their children reply that they can learn what they need in three hours and so what’s the point of spending all the rest of the time there. 

But O’Connor said learning the routine of showing up was important in itself. 

“I don’t think you can replace the face-to-face contact ... and the interactions and amount of teaching that takes place through one student’s questioning that other students actually benefit from,” he said. 

“It should never be underestimated that kind of discussion and that almost Socratic form of learning.” 

He also said the childhood and teenage years were important times to teach about the “personal reward that comes from being a contributing member of society, not someone locked in their room, who is feeling anxious”. 

“We actually need to teach them how to actually cope with those those feelings so that they can get back into mainstream society,” he said. 

O’Connor acknowledged there are students who struggle and that there’s not one model that fits all, saying his school has four full-time counselors. 

“There’s boys and there’s students who need significant help,” he said. 

“But we need them back in front of us because we can assess where they’re at by the look on their face, the grimace, the interactions that are happening, and we can actually provide them more support.” 

When Woodham suggested sometimes mothers “aren’t the best people to be around teenage boys” because they can be overprotective or smothering and not helping them to “man-up”, O’Connor replied: “Well, I don’t know that I’d want to comment on that on national radio would I?” 

He then said it is natural for any parent to care for their child. 

“But there are some times where the best thing you can do to care for them is to be teaching them independence so that they can actually make their way in the world,” he said. 

Nathan Walsh, a representative of Christchurch’s Hagley College, earlier told The Press some students had struggled to attend classes at the school due to extracurricular activities and mental or physical health concerns. 

Auckland Grammar School headmaster Tim O'Connor says showing up to the right place at the right time is a life lesson we all need to learn. Photo / Jason Oxenham 

“We have tried different initiatives to get students to attend our traditional five-day face-to-face model, but we questioned if there was a model of learning that better met the needs of a specific group of students,” he said. 

All those involved in the trial had to prove they could work independently and needed the support of their parents to take part. 

The school would also set up processes to catch students early if they showed signs of not being able to cope with the independent learning style. 

Liz McDowell, the deputy principal of fellow Christchurch college Avonside Girls’ High School, told the media outlet she was excited by the trial.