“The mission has always stayed the same. The question was, how do we give that oxygen and bring it to life?”
Dan Reddiex, Headmaster
Dan Reddiex is an education expert and reformer who has led a team of more than 200 committed people in a transformational programme of change at Dilworth School.
Shortly after Dan Reddiex, Dilworth’s Headmaster, joined the school in 2019, he quickly realised how necessary it was to significantly rebuild the school, its culture, and its reputation from the ground up. An experienced educator and reformer, his task was nothing less than transformational change to rebuild trust with students, families, and the wider community - including the former students who had survived the travesties of historical abuse.
Dilworth’s Trust Board commissioned an independent inquiry into historical abuse at the school in 2022. The Inquiry Report made 19 recommendations, all of which have been accepted by the Board.
“The Board and the School have worked so incredibly hard to implement those recommendations over the last 18 months and the work is ongoing,” says Dan. “At a personal level my heart breaks for those former students who suffered abuse at Dilworth. I’ve met with many of them and their families, cried with them, and felt the depth of their hurt. I really hope the efforts being made and the significant financial investment and resourcing under Dilworth Response, including the Independent Redress Programme, reflect our commitment to try and rectify the things inside of our control today. We want to help our entire community address a chapter of shame and for our survivors to know they have been heard.”
Formerly the Headmaster of Kings High School in Dunedin, Dan oversaw a substantial programme of change before joining Dilworth. “I felt as though I’d done all that I could at Kings, and I was really just left tinkering at the margins, which isn’t in my DNA,” he says.
“A friend came down for coffee, and said, ‘Hey, have you heard about Dilworth?’ And that’s how my Dilworth journey started. The piece that appealed to me, and ultimately what drew me, was the school’s mission. The Dilworth mission is remarkable. There’s nothing else like it in the New Zealand educational landscape. It is essentially about providing fully funded scholarships for students from families who have an aspiration for their son to excel, but whose circumstances may be a barrier to him fulfilling his potential – and that could be for a whole host of reasons,” says Dan.
“Dilworth has always welcomed students from families who want to make the most of opportunities they might otherwise not be able to access. And I love that.”
But while the School’s mission is the passion and motivation that drives him, for the more than 200 permanent staff members at Dilworth, he says what was needed most when he arrived was a well-articulated vision.
“The mission has always stayed the same. The question was, how do we give that oxygen and bring it to life? What does that look like in a practical way in 2025? In the modern context. And I think the two parts that have really come alive in the last six years are the focus on developing young men of good character and a drive for personal excellence. It’s about knowing in their hearts who they are and knowing that if they give their best, they will flourish in life.”
The product of a working-class family, Dan says his parents both worked multiple jobs to keep the family functioning.
“Mum committed her life to raising three kids. What was instilled in me from the outset is the value of hard work and the value of people and relationships. While Mum and Dad didn’t come from a religious background, they held a lot of those fundamental Christian values, which they infused into every part of our lives with words, but more importantly, with their actions. And so I think that gave me a really good foundation and a core value set. Personally, I do have a relationship with God, which just reinforces those values and also makes Dilworth an obvious connection for me as a place where all of those things I believe in come together. Education is crucial to the development of our young men, not just intellectually but also of the whole person and the soul. So this really is the dream job for me.”
Dan will have been at Dilworth for six years in April. A significant milestone, it’s also a time to reflect on the enormous amount of work he’s overseen to rebuild the school. “We’ve had two parallel work streams,” he says. “One has been confronting and addressing the issues from our past. The other has been the programme to completely reset the school and make it the safe, secure, and educationally excellent place it should be. In my 30 years in education, I’ve never seen a more ambitious programme of change. Effectively, we’ve redesigned the whole school.”
He says it’s been challenging, as the school has had to build and implement the changes while still flying the plane. “We were still running our school while transforming it. We invested first and foremost in student safeguarding and the school became Child Wise Accredited in September 2022*. We’ve completely overhauled the academic curriculum and totally redesigned our Learning in the Outdoors programme, which has now achieved a commercial-level safety qualification.
We’ve also created a wellbeing curriculum called Ako Puāwaitanga for our students. It’s taught from Year Seven through to Year 13 and is designed to develop our students emotionally and as people, to help them flourish beyond the school gates. It’s a completely bespoke programme designed specifically for our young men, not bought ‘off the shelf’. It’s all about our students learning essential life skills in an intentional way. We’ve infused that into every part of the school. It is having an impact already and has remarkable potential as a change agent. I haven’t seen anything quite like it anywhere else in my travels.”
The academic curriculum has also been dramatically reworked, with a much deeper integration between the junior and senior campuses ensuring a clear educational pathway from Years Seven to 13, and a more formal scaffold for learning and knowledge. “There’s been a huge push for excellence at Dilworth,” Dan says. “It’s about our boys being the absolute best versions of themselves they can be. That’s been driven right across the school, and the expectation on all our students is they will front with maximum effort. Over the last few years NCEA pass rates have consistently been knocking on the door of 100%.”
That said, Dan believes anything short of 100% isn’t good enough. “Nationally, 20% of children are going to school hungry. Our boys get seven meals a day. Nationally, attendance rates sit between 60-70%. Ours are well north of 90%. The simple functioning of the school takes away a lot of the barriers to success that present themselves in other environments, so from my point of view, a 100% pass rate should be the minimum expectation.”
Small class sizes at both junior and senior campuses, and the hiring and retention of specialist subject teachers and support staff who actively help the students with learning in class, have all helped push Dilworth to near the top of the academic rankings. But the biggest shift, Dan says, and the one he’s most proud of, has been at a more molecular level - in the school’s culture.
“We know that in any organisation, culture is King,” Dan says. “So that’s the change I’m happiest about over the last five or six years. All the programmes, structures, and systems we’ve implemented are starting to embed now, and they’re helping the boys to flourish. But it’s the culture change that is the most significant. Some of the fruits we’re seeing are in our sporting success - which is on a level now that the school hasn’t achieved previously -our incredible performance in different music competitions, the debating team making the Auckland finals two years running, and our business studies students taking the podium in a national competition.
“That’s all driven by a culture of excellence, and it’s starting to pop up across every single field of our endeavour. That’s incredibly exciting. But it’s even more than that. It’s the intent our students now carry inside, a desire to be the best, and the belief that they can be. It’s a concept of personal excellence that is starting to be lived out in real ways every day. It’s become a part of who we are, and what it means to be here at Dilworth.”
Dan says the progress over the last six years has been thrilling: “It’s the whole purpose, right? It’s the bit that gets me out of bed in the morning and stops me from going to bed early at night. We’re trying to effect a change in our students that will flow on into their lives, into their families, and ultimately into our communities. We’re starting to see our students truly fulfilling their potential, and that’s our collective success.”