Aiming for a positive future

Mission:

To provide skills, values and education that enable Services Academy students to take a positive role in New Zealand society.

Vision:

Whanganui City College Services Academy initiative is designed to assist Year 12 and 13 students to make informed decisions for their chosen career pathway, learn a number of life skills conducive to their own success and contributing to their long term economic independence and social well being.

Services academy course outline:

During the course, students will cover the following areas:

1. Military Service Skills, marching and military terminology.

2. Physical Training, improving health and wellbeing.

3. Adventure-based learning (ABL), teamwork and leadership. 4. Students core subjects of their choice.

With all these, you will acquire the skills needed to obtain the Vision and Mission of the Services Academy here at Whanganui City College.

COURSE OUTLINE

The course draws on several areas of the curriculum. These are:

LITERACY, NUMERACY and SCIENCE

Students are expected to achieve literacy, numeracy and science credits and they will be guided when selecting modules to achieve a min of 10 credits in each. From an NCEA standpoint, students are given work at an appropriate level for their achievement.  Those at Level 1 or 2 attend Academy classes. If they already have Level 2 they will attend classes outside the Academy. In addition to this there is a focus on testing in the style of the recruit testing for the NZDF. These tests were developed in the 1960s and 70s and have not changed since. As a result, they are very different to the NCEA style of assessment and there is a need to coach students in how to achieve in this type of testing.  For example most questions are multi-choice and in addition they are sat under a very high time constraints.

PHYSICAL TRAINING

Healthy Bodies, Healthy Minds. Demand results, give no Excuses. The aim of physical training is to improve fitness, health and wellbeing; both physically and mentally.  The course is comprised of:

• Long Aerobic workouts – running
• Resistance training
• Circuit training
• Pack marching
• Beep Test and
• Army RFL (required fitness level test) consisting of a  2.4km run, push ups and sit ups.

This will be used to gauge physical improvements.