Yet more similar questions by daft Poms
 

Having been married to a Kiwi for 13 years, I am taking the plunge and allowing him to return to the Motherland. However, we have two girls aged 6 and 14 who are both in very high achieving schools - smaller one is in a private girl prep and the older one is in year 9 in a top 100 state school. Apart from the usual worries about money, jobs, leaving family, I am particularly worried about schooling as I seem to be getting conflicting information, not only from this fantastic forum but also from other sources.

As we have family in Waikanae (Kapiti Coast) and The Hutt we thought we would live in Wellington and also my OH spent alot of his late teenage years there and wants to recapture them!!!! We have looked at Karori as we are particularly impressed by Samuel Marsden. Does anyone have any experience of living in Karori or attending Samuel Marsden? Alternatively, we have also looked at living in the Kapiti area, but again we are unsure of the schools. WHilst I am happy for my eldest to go by train into either Whitby or Wellington the little one is really too small to have such a long day. What are the schools like in Waikanae or Param?

Thanks for reading this long story and I hope someone out there can help.:)

Re: Yet more similar questions by daft Poms
 

Can I make one suggestion - before any others, Samuel Marsden is lovely but even your older daughter would have one heck of a commute to get there from Kapiti. She would need to transfer from the train to the bus to get to Karori. Not such an issue if you lived a bit closer in, but, travelling for an hour on the train and then transferring to a bus could be quite hard. I am speaking here from a public transport point of view btw, not as someone who could speak for your daughter! I have no idea if that kind of commute would be fine for her but i do know it would tire a lot of adults.


You may want to check if there is still a bus/transport from the kapiti coast to Lower Hutt though. Chilton St James is well regarded.

Re: Yet more similar questions by daft Poms
 

You may want to 'pm' a poster called Spid - she did loads of research into schools (state and private) in the Wellington area and also had girls not boys I think...or maybe both, which makes it even harder to match school- house - work within a reasonable geographical area - in a system with tendencies to single sex education as you can imagine.

Re: Yet more similar questions by daft Poms
 

Yep, happy to help. PM me by all means!

Re: Yet more similar questions by daft Poms
 

Two suggestions:

1. Your Kiwi ought to get British citizenship before he leaves the U.K., if he's not got it already.

2. If your younger daughter is British born, then she is a New Zealand citizen by descent. Strongly advisable to upgrade this to full NZ citizenship (by grant) once you are settled in New Zealand.

This means she will be able to pass on her NZ citizenship to her own children, if they are also born outside NZ. There is no 5 year residence requirement if she is under 16 and has a NZ citizen parent.