Dear Novaneers,

Happy new year!  I am writing you this letter from Johannesburg, where the final rainy week of December has given way to a new year’s weekend of sunshine and brilliantly clear blue skies.  I am thankful to have been able to spend the December holidays with family, and to have rung in the new year together as a family.  While 2022 will no doubt have its challenges, the year has started with a great new energy.  May this early sunshine be a sign of a positive year ahead! 

Looking back to 2020 and 2021, I am incredibly proud of – and deeply grateful – for the Nova Pioneer community: for our students, families, and teammates.  Your commitment to our students and to our culture principles of Greater Together, Solutions First and High Expectations, enabled us to reach new educational heights, even as we persevered through the shocks of the pandemic.  In 2021, Novaneer students published books, won gold and silver medals in the Yale World Scholars Cup, placed 1st and 3rd place nationally in Kenya’s Junior Achievement Entrepreneurial Company Programme, travelled internationally, organised inspiring campus programmes, conducted community service, studied diligently, supported each other and experienced great personal and academic growth.  Across all our secondary schools, our graduating students in 2021 built on and surpassed the exam success of their predecessors. In Kenya, the May 2021 graduates of Tatu Girls and Boys Secondary schools did us all proud by achieving an 8.0 composite average, including a number of superlative individual results, and doing so in their 1st and 2nd KCSE sittings respectively.  Well done to all our students and teachers, and to the families and teammates who support them!   

So what lies ahead?  In 2022 we will continue to focus on the intention we set 12 months ago: to build every Nova Pioneer school into a Beacon of Excellence and Value.  Here is what we wrote last year:

In 2018 former South African President Kgalema Mothlanthe visited Nova Pioneer and challenged us to become beacons of excellence, demonstrating what is possible in African education.  The transformational power of institutions of excellence resonates with us.  They stand out for doing distinctively good work and are beacons of possibility. 

Being Beacons of Excellence and Value means sharpening our focus on educational excellence, with an attentiveness to understand what our students and parents value.  It means making clear choices about which of those we can best serve and how, and then visibly delivering on it.

That vision served us well in 2021 and the early feedback from our families was very positive.  Twice a year we seek our families’ feedback and voice through a biannual survey.  In 2021, across Kenya and South Africa, our family positivity rating grew by a remarkable 50%, from an already strong base!  

Through those surveys, Novaneer families told us they valued [1] Nova Pioneer’s academic rigour and 21st century preparation, [2] the care and individual attention shown by our teachers for each of our students, [3] improvements in communication, and [4] the way our schools and teachers adapted to the pandemic, ensuring safe and continuous learning.  Once again, I am grateful for the deep commitment and care of students, teachers, and support teammates alike; and especially for our parents’ generous and steadfast partnership.

However, we have more work to do.  We must work to further grow our students’ achievements, shine brighter as beacons, and thereby deliver on our mission of developing innovators and leaders who will shape the African Century.  As we do so we also need to do what we can to protect affordability for families, by striving to be even more efficient in the way we work and judicious in prioritising what matters most to our students’ education.    

In the 2021 surveys, our families asked that we stay focused on excellence in each of the areas mentioned above, and that we expand the opportunities that our students have to explore and develop their interests and talents beyond the classroom.  Informed in part by that feedback, a few points of focus in 2022 will be:

• Invest further in our student experience. Specifically, we will [1] selectively expand the opportunities our students have beyond the classroom to pursue passions and connect with each other (including across schools and enabled by technology).  Nova Pioneer schools currently offer a wide range of extracurricular and cultural opportunities, some of which may be specific to your school.  Therefore I will defer to your school to communicate over the course of this year about the opportunities that are available, and any new ones that become available as a result of further planning.   [2] We will invest in our Post School Success programme and personnel so that we continue to give Novaneers a ‘leg-up’ in preparing for tertiary and other post-school opportunities.  
• Refresh each Nova Pioneer schools’ Individual School Strategy. Each Nova Pioneer school will review its medium term educational programme plan (including the points noted in above); while also planning for long-term fiscal health and school growth.  While Nova Pioneer schools are made consistent by our shared mission, culture principles, and distinctive educational approach, each school is a unique community of students, faculty, and families, in a unique local context.  That offers each school unique opportunities to manifest our shared vision for Novaneers, and so we will identify, prioritize among, and pursue those.  
• Operate efficiently. Even as we continue to prioritize educational excellence, we must remain focused on value for families.  We already see the signs of growing inflation in both Kenya and South Africa, and we are likely to see that inflation accelerate as economies work back from the effects of COVID-19.  While protecting our commitment to educational excellence, we will seek out opportunities to work even more cost effectively, to mitigate the impact of inflation on families wherever we can. 

As we do all that, we will keep true to our foundations as Nova Pioneer: [1] our mission to develop innovators and leaders, [2] our culture that is built on our six culture principles; [3] our commitment to academic excellence; and [3] our vision of learning, where every Novaneer discovers that he or she is fundamentally capable.

With gratitude and best wishes for a positive 2022,

Chinezi Chijioke
Founder and CEO, Nova Pioneer