114 | Ōtūmoetai College: Livingstone Building T T Virginia Wright School renovation well underway COMMUNITY Tauranga’s Ōtūmoetai College is currently undergoing significant upgrading, which aims to transform the state coeducational secondary school into a practical, well-designed learning environment. Established in 1965 with a role in the low hundreds, by the time its current principal, Russell Gordon, took up the position in 2018, its buildings were in need of some serious attention. In the time he’s been there, the school, which now has around 2000 students, has been given a number of different scenarios from successive governments. These were finally resolved into the current situation as of 2024, with the agreed plan now well underway. To start with, the oldest of the school’s classrooms were demolished and replaced with three new OMB (Offsite Manufactured Buildings), which provide a culturally responsive learning environment for students taking part in kapa haka and Te Ao Māori studies. The administration and pastoral areas have since been refurbished, and work is underway on a 10-classroom block, the Livingstone Building, which is part of a plan to be implemented over the next four years. The school has four so-called Nelson blocks; a highly recognisable, standardised classroom building design deployed widely across the country during the late 1950s and 1960s. They were constructed at Otumoetai College in stages from 1964 to 1973 to cater for its growing role. Given the ongoing expectation of new buildings over several years, while the interior of the Nelson blocks has been maintained in the interests of the students’ learning, their exteriors have not, as Russell explains. “They’re quite worn. These buildings have been left in situ, because for the last 20 years it’s been imminent that they’re going to be demolished, which is no longer happening. An essential part of the current plan is the new 10-classroom building they started in November 2025 with a completion date of November 2026.” Once the 10-classroom Livingstone Building is complete, the first of the Nelson blocks, currently used for the maths department, will move into it for the year or so it takes for that block to be thoroughly refurbished. Then it will be the science block’s turn, and so on. The four ‘temporary’ prefabs that have been clustered on the edges of the school’s fortunately extensive grounds, plus two other standalones, will all be removed once they have served their purpose in helping cater for the students when the Nelson blocks are unavailable. “Once they’ve gone, with the new building we’ll be back to the correct amount of classrooms for the size of our student cohort, and all of our classrooms will be up to the standard you’d like your child to be learning in. Plus, instead of being spread around the school, the different departments will be together in one space and be able to work more closely as teams,” says Russell.. Each of the two-storey buildings will have multiple independent classrooms with the flexibility to open up some of them if the need arises, plus an administration room and toilet block on each level. Thanks to the care taken by the Ministry and their architects to work closely with the school, the predominantly grey Colorsteel cladding uses accents of green and blue to align with the way the school uses colour and to help foster a sense of belonging. “To me, the environment is critical for everything else that happens within the teaching and learning relationship and we’ll have a site that everyone’s going to benefit from,” says Russell. The multi-million-dollar transformation is well underway, and by 2030 Otūmoetai College will have been comprehensively modernised and be well resourced to take its students through the 21st century.
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