Jo Grant is the founding principal of Te Rau Horopito, one of New Zealand’s newest schools. Fresh off an exciting stopover on her leadership journey, having helped set up UHub in Upper Hutt, Jo is exhilarated by the unique possibilities of starting a school while the community it’s set to serve grows alongside it.
Haere mai to the country’s newest learning adventure
Rolleston is a short 30-minute drive inland from Christchurch and is growing thick and fast with new houses and roads popping up every time you blink. It’s one of the fastest growing regions in the country and is tipped to almost double in size over the next couple of decades.
Nestled within Rolleston’s expanding blueprint is Arbor Green, a modern subdivision still on the market and still inviting new families to join the “community they’ve always wished for”. As the cement sets and the street lamps get wired in, the heart of that community – Te Rau Horopito School – has already started beating.
Te Rau Horopito School is a brand new addition to the growing Rolleston lineup of quality primary education offerings, sitting alongside the likes of Lemonwood Grove, West Rolleston, and Clearview Primary. We dropped into the school in early March to meet the staff and principal Jo Grant, and hear about how things were going. What emerged is a story about career agency and how, as principals, taking charge, and taking chances, can lead you to becoming the leader you always wanted to be.
Getting the band together
Jo first landed in Rolleston in early 2025, a full year before the school was due to open. Rerooting her life, along with a husband, the dog, and the cat, was going to be a mission in itself, let alone starting up a brand new school.
“I remember standing on this field [in Arbor Green, now Te Rau Horopito] just before interviewing for the job,” Jo says.
“There were no houses around and I thought, ‘this site doesn’t look that big, where are the houses, and how will they fit a kura built for 1,000 students here in a year . . . ?’”
She didn’t run for the Alps. Jo instead leaned into the support of her establishment board and began to embrace the ambiguity of the situation.
“I’ve used the phrase ‘the Te Rau Horopito Adventure’ from the start,” Jo told me.
“Adventures are often a bit unknown. They have good parts and really hard parts, but you just keep moving and start getting people to join in. It might have just been me at the start, but then it’s us, and then it’s we, and it just gets bigger and bigger. You build the village, you embrace the adventure together.”
“The opportunity to employ a whole staff at once was just incredible. I was looking for staff who believed deeply in young people, their potential and in the future.”
Cosying up to the unknown
Right from the beginning, Jo has embedded the mantra, “work deeply but hold lightly”, into the school’s DNA.
A firm believer that schools should be designed with the students, whānau, and the community, there was a fundamental problem: none of that existed yet. Nevertheless, well before the doors opened to students in February this year, Jo brought the teaching team together for a full term of learning.
“We had 10 weeks of designing, planning, and preparing for the opening of the school,” Jo says.
“A lot of time was spent on the dream, the vision and the strategic plan – some of the detail, but not a lot of the nuts and bolts, because we didn’t know whether we needed 20 classrooms on day one or two.”
Jo and the team’s vision and strategic plan was based on the gifting of their name, whakataukī, and values from Taumutu. These guided them and cemented their commitment to tangata whenua and Te Tiriti o Waitiangi from the beginning.
“Since so much was unpredictable, a major part of that time was dedicated to helping staff connect, build relationships, and become comfortable operating in the space of the unknown,” she says.
“We think really deeply about our vision and the strategic plans and our goals, but we hold them lightly because we’re very happy to move away from them if, as now, we’ve started to meet families, and we’re starting to learn what’s important to them.”
“I’ve learned to let go of thinking I need to know everything, or that we need to know everything. It’s so liberating to comfortably say to families, ‘I don’t know’, ‘I need to find out more’, ‘Can you teach me more?’ They get a sense that you are open, that you want to learn alongside them, that you value partnership, and you are genuine.”
Jo is a real believer that schools should serve the community they are part of.
“We’re here to listen and learn and grow the kura into what the community needs, so we ask every family that comes to visit, what do good schools look like? What would they like to see here? What is the role of a school? What would we be doing, and what would you be doing?”
“I think the kids and the families that we have here are brave, just like our staff, in terms of wanting to come in and start in a new school. Every day I think about how lucky – really lucky – I am to be able to bring more and more people along on this adventure,” she says.
Teaming up to shake up Upper Hutt
Te Rau Horopito wasn’t Jo’s first adventure. Before landing her new role and moving to Te Waipounamu, Jo lived in Upper Hutt. She led Upper Hutt school from 2015 to 2023, gaining rich experience as a school leader, but had taken a break from principalship to turn a community initiative from idea to reality.
“You know, I loved [Upper Hutt] school,” Jo said. “But it was almost overnight that I just had the sense that it was time to leave – which is interesting, when you love a place – but it just felt like it was time to do something else and to give someone else the opportunity to come in and bring their flavour into the school.”
Jo was part of a cluster of schools in Upper Hutt that had been talking about finding different ways to do more for young people and their whānau. The schools had pulled together a range of local agencies that wanted to deliver a central place for young people and whānau to connect and get the support they needed.
“We didn’t believe there were a lot of services for families who were trying to navigate their way through raising young people. As a cluster, we’d been talking about wanting to do something different for young people in the community space for six years, and I just felt it was time for someone to really step into this idea and to see if we could make it happen,” she says.
That someone was Jo, who diligently took on the task as the UHub project lead. With a dedicated Board, an innovative RTLB Practice Manager, the support of local schools, Ōrongomai Marae, Council, and Upper Hutt business people, she started working in the Upper Hutt community space full-time. Within 12 months, she’d helped establish UHub, and with a group of LSC, RTLB, and Orongomai Marae staff, began supporting families and whānau, connecting them to services, empowering them, and being there to listen.
Career agency and community experience
I was curious to understand how Jo thought this period away from the profession helped get her ready to come back to it.
“Being a tumuaki is the most amazing job, but it is also complex, dynamic, and challenging,” Jo says.
“I thought I knew a lot about community. But actually to be working in the community space and experiencing things from inside that space, I learned a lot more,” she says.
“For tumuaki, I think the ability to ‘step out’ into slightly different roles and to ‘come back’, you know, if all tumuaki had that opportunity, and of course, it’s not always that simple, but wow, it can bring a different approach and appreciation to the role.”
“I listened to families in different ways, listened to young people in different ways, listened to agencies in different ways. They were open with some of the barriers they found when they were working with schools, sometimes how hard they found it to connect with schools, how overwhelming it was and how much easier they found it to be in a neutral space.”
UHub is still going, and Jo is still proudly part of its Board, but she could always hear the bells calling her back to school. She saw an ad in the Education Gazette in 2024 for Te Rau Horopito and it was instant; she “just knew” that it was her next role.
“I’d listened and learned so much through my community role, and wanted to go back and do more, and do it differently, working in a new community-focused way,” Jo says.
Taking command of your leadership adventure
As a DP at a former school, an incident occurred which illuminated the importance of having skills and strategies to find resolutions. In response, Jo had completed a Conflict Resolution and Mediation qualification.
“The mediator training was another little bit that helped me towards becoming the leader that I dreamed about being. It was the best training I’ve ever done in my life (fantastic skills to use with your husband and your own teenagers too). Probably the biggest thing I’ve learned to do – is to truly listen,” she says.
“I listen to people, because there’s so much to learn from people, and, you know, to find the magic that everyone has.”
Being true to who you are
Jo’s positivity is relentless, but she’s very pragmatic. It’s a balancing act, but by being genuine and being available to her staff, students, community, and even random visitors like me – it all reminds her why she does what she does.
“I tell my staff we should teach as if we have a microphone on us all the time, that everything that we say is going out to our families’ homes, because it is. Our words and the way we say them matter. Kids and whānau know people, they instantly get a sense of genuineness, and will pick up on you really quickly,” she says.
While I was talking to Jo, a young person popped in with Mrs. Norman to show off some writing. The class had been talking about playground behaviour and the student had spelled out a number of phrases, “You cannot push people off the swing”, “Teachers are here to help us when we need,” and “We have value”. It was a really heartwarming moment, both seeing how happy the child was to have a seamless and genuine interaction with their principal, and to see the pure joy on Jo’s face. I’m not sure who was more excited to get the special Principal stickers out!
“I honestly have the best job in the world, Alex,” Jo said to me, beaming.
“This Rau Horopito adventure that we’ve only just started is going to be full of surprises, fun, hard work, and a little bit of crazy.”
Learn more about Te Rau Horopito on their website and Facebook pages.