16 March 2026

Polyfest is fast approaching and our groups are in the final stages of their preparation before competing later this week (Kapa Haka perform in week 10). Between these two dates is our annual Fiafia Night, this year being held in the Jack Adam gym to accommodate the larger stage size necessary for our groups. Thank you to parents/tutors etc that have been supporting their children through the commitment required for this event.

With three weeks of term remaining, it is important for our students to be getting on top of assessment deadlines – this is one of the areas being covered in our new academic mentoring programme. Keep an eye out later in the term for short surveys which will be seeking feedback on the new senior academic mentoring, and on our new Year 9 and 10 programmes.

Tabloids Day

Firstly, a huge thank you to our student leadership team (guided by Mrs Mitchell) who organized and ran the day – the first full House competition event of the year. A special thanks to our generous sponsors as well that allowed our students to run a very enjoyable event – Craig Walker, The Massey High School Foundation, and the Jelas Trust.

Changes to Microsoft Teams Chat

As you may be aware, the chat function within Microsoft Teams was disabled on Friday. Massey High School has an obligation to provide a healthy digital space for students.

Whilst the majority of students were using the system correctly, there were still large numbers of messages across all year levels that were not school related. There were also huge numbers of chat messages (again, across all year levels) that indicated that the chat function was being used as a de-facto social media platform, often to the detriment of in-class work.

For these reasons, Massey High School, like many other schools has now disabled the chat function.

Some students have expressed concern that they have lost work and/or feedback that was sent to them via Chat. This information has not been lost. Instructions for how students can retrieve this information will be made available shortly. Similarly, students can request that teachers access the relevant chat to re-send the information to the student via email.

The Supervised Chat function will be enabled in the coming days – this will allow teachers/staff to initiate Teams Chats with a student/group of students in order to provide feedback etc. Chats of this nature will remain active as long as the teacher/staff member remains in the chat. Students will not be able to initiate chats with staff or other students.

Students can still communicate with class Teams, extra-curricular Teams, and sports Teams via posting on those Teams that they belong to. However, we do remind them to keep responses on subject. Obviously, students can still communicate with their teachers via email to official school email addresses from their own school email account.