Deputy Prime Minister David Seymour. Photo / Mark Mitchell
By Russell Palmer of RNZ
Associate Education Minister David Seymour says a new charter school will provide more options for families in Wairoa, which is suffering high truancy rates.
Te Whare Kounga will open with a roll of 65 secondary students in term three this year, rising to 165 students from the start of 2027, for Years 7 to 13.
The school, located at a former primary school on Carroll St, builds on the transition programme Te Papatipu Matihiko, which for the past two years has aimed to help children get back to school with a new enthusiasm for learning.
Te Papatipu Matihiko board member Chris Cormack said the school would still teach all the core subjects, but would use a different learning model based on Māori philosophy.
“They’ll start each day with kind of a swim or something to do with water – and that’s almost symbolic as well. An actual thing of, like, ‘we’re leaving all the stuff that’s happened at home, happened on the way to school, whatever,’ and we’re kind of starting fresh for the day.
“Then working with them to kind of create individual learning plans following the curriculum broadly, but ... a more integrated learning approach, and having them move kind of at their pace.
“A big thing in Wairoa’s slash in the river and flooding and those kind of things, so maybe that’s what they’re interested in, so you craft the year’s curriculum around that – so we might study the river, we can do biology and chemistry and then we might use sensors and have a programme that records that into a computer.”
He said it was about building learning around things that got the ākonga excited and wanting to come to class.
“Building up their confidence, helping them navigate group situations, manage conflict, de-escalate – those kinds of things, to get them to a place where you can challenge them a bit more. You don’t want to, like, challenge them on their first day because they’re going to shut down.”
Cormack said Te Papatipu Matihiko had found students would return to school after the transitional programme ended, but drop out again, so they had decided instead to build a longer-term solution.
“When they went back to school, they weren’t necessarily succeeding there because it was such a different learning environment than the one they’d kind of got used to and they didn’t have the support,” he said.
“It was a good programme, people got very excited, not everyone dropped out – people went on to learning, which was far better than the alternative before. But we realised that we could do more, essentially, with a longer period of time.”
An ERO report shows the nearby Wairoa College had a statutory manager installed in December 2024 to help with low attendance and improve learning outcomes.
Despite that, attendance rates remained well below the target, with less than half of students attending regularly.
Cormack said those kinds of difficulties were what Te Whare Kounga aimed to address.
“You’ve got to teach to kind of the middle when you’re a big school, you can’t necessarily accommodate everyone. And that’s no fault of the state schools or the teachers there, who are wonderful people and trying their best, but when you’ve got big classrooms, there’s only so much you can do.
“It’s just an option for those who currently are kind of falling through the cracks.”
He said state secondary schools were already very different to employment, university or polytechnics, and it was hoped the more holistic learning approach would better prepare students than a strictly subject-based education.
Seymour said Te Papatipu Matihiko was an established programme with a good track record, “which has earned the trust of some people who, frankly, don’t trust the state or its schools any more”.
“These are students who, in many cases, have been checked out of state education. We don’t want to get into a blame game about why that is, we just want to get them re-engaged in education.”
Pushing back on questions about whether it would make sense to instead bolster Wairoa College, he said it was receiving the same resources as other state schools, or “I suspect, slightly more”.
“The question is, if putting resources into something isn’t working and you’ve got an alternative, then why shouldn’t the students be able to take their entitlement to funding as a New Zealand citizen to a school that works for them?” Seymour said.
“The thing about education is that you really only get one shot. That’s not to say people can’t sometimes go back, but for the most part, you get one shot and that’s why it’s vital. If these students aren’t engaged and there’s an entity with a track record of engaging them in the community, then maybe we should fund them to get the job done – that’s what charter schools allow.”
He said some people would see charter schools and state schools as competing but, in Christchurch, four state school principals had worked together to sponsor a charter school “because they recognise that there are some students that they are not actively serving”.
Describing the demand as “overwhelming”, Seymour said nine applications for a charter school were rejected for every approval, putting that down to limited funding.
He said he expected new attendance services and his STAR mandatory attendance action plans were initiatives being rolled out this year, “that I believe will make a difference at Wairoa College and indeed every other school that’s faced a challenge around school attendance”.
-RNZ