We could tell you why we think that MIC is rather special and has advantages over other schools (and indeed we do on other pages or in our downloadable material), but we would like to focus on what our existing parents have to say. We conducted a survey amongst our parents and the chief things that attracted them to MIS were:

• Small classes of no more than 15 in a class – on rare occassions we will go up to 16 in order not to break up a family of children.

• Our style of teaching which tends to be more as a family atmosphere. We can do that because of our small class sizes.

• Our curriculum, it has an origin and strong basis in the New Zealand curriculum but it is very much our own. We've spent years designing the curriculum working 'backwards'. That is thinking about what attributes we wanted our children to have when they became adults, and then we worked backwards from there.

• Our price. We are not cheap compared to local public schools but we are considerably cheaper than the main private school. Our prices have been pitched to be affordable for a local professional family of 2-4 children.

• A 13 year programme. Primary and secondary are in the same location and we encourage students to mix across the age cohorts. Seniors get to take on leadership roles, and juniors have aspirational role models that they can lean upon and learn from.

• Children have easy transition paths out of MIS should they wish to leave us (for instance if a family relocates abroad), both if they leave before the end of the 13th year, or if they stay for the whole programme and end up with a leaving certificate. So far (as of 2024) none of our leaving students have been impeeded or denied from attending their educational or professional career path becuse of our educational programme.

We do not pretend is that MIS is a school that can cater to all children and work equally well for all of them. This is clearly nonsense and goes against our own philosophical approach to education.

However, we feel we can state that many, if not most children positively thrive in our school environment. The reason being that we tend to utilise the natural tendencies of children's desire to learn and then inherent curiosity about the world. For us, educating children is as much about staying out of the way of these natural and inbuilt tendencies, as well as being there at the appropriate time to provide a guide or helping hand.

There are however, some children who absolutely thrive in a highly ordered programme with clear delineations of topics, and who are required to go at a uniform pace with the rest of the class; where creative problem solving and questioning are not a priority; where there are elements in the school that can take off the 'rough edges' of a child. We respect that.

These children probably would not get out as much from MIS as other children. We have had some enlightened parents who have absolutely understood this and sent one or more of their children to us, and their other child)-ren) to another school, because they felt that the schools relfected the personalities and dispositions of their individual children. Bravo!

Clearly this is a big topic. If you would like to learn more about what makes us unique, please download our school brochure.

“My three oldest children attended MIS. They have schooled in Australia, the USA and Fiji at both public and private schools. I’d never seen them as excited about going to school as they were at MIS. Each of them keenly shared experiences from school each day at the dinner table. They loved their teachers and friends and really enjoyed the impromptu guitar lessons, the school meetings where they get to chair the meetings and air their opinions about the school’s operations and the hands-on cooking lessons. Bravo for taking learning to a new, practical level.”

Lynda Tabuya, lawyer & parlimentarian and mother of 6.