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Thousands of children are back in school this week, and the principal of a Northland school says it was a joyous return.
Pat Newman from Hora Hora School in Whangarei, which has a high Māori roll, says about 70 per cent of students returned, with a lot of parents saying they wanted to wait until Level 1.
He says there were valuable lessons to be learned from the lockdown by schools and whānau.
"How fantastic it is when the school and the homes communicate to a big degree, how great it is working with the families at one with the school, how the kids can have fun, how the families can have fun. We had three parents say this has been the best time of their lives as a family, where they are all together for such a long time and able to be family and not having to race off to jobs and all the rest, so we have got to look at how we capture that and keep that going," he says.
Pat Newman says the children understand the need to give people breathing space, and with the amount of hand sanitiser around school children in New Zealand will have the cleanest hands of children anywhere.
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