Northland College plans to become a charter school to improve achievement for its predominantly Māori students.
By John Gerritsen of RNZ
Northland College is making moves to become a charter school and is the first state school to publicly reveal it is doing so.
The Kaikohe school says it desperately needs to do something to lift achievement for its predominantly Māori students and has the backing of Northland iwi, Ngāpuhi.
In June, Auckland school Al-Madinah became the first and so far only state integrated school to admit it had applied for conversion.
Unlike regular state schools, integrated schools already meet one of the charter school requirements of having a third-party owner or sponsor.
Northland College principal Duane Allen said he was formerly a strong opponent of charter schools, but after five years in charge of Northland College he saw a need to try a different approach.
“We’ve got really, really good people here who are working really hard to try and come up with innovative solutions within the current system... and we haven’t been able to get the direction that we’d like to. So it’s a genuine investigation and step into an alternative that we think could be quite powerful.”
He said the school and sponsor Te Rūnanga-Ā-Iwi-O-Ngāpuhi filed final documentation for a formal expression of interest last week.
Allen said if the school progressed to a full application, a conversion to charter status could begin in the middle of next year and be complete by the start of the 2027 school year.
The coalition Government has budgeted for 35 state and integrated schools to convert this year and next.
Allen said charter status would give the school more flexibility to meet the needs of students who were 96% Māori and mostly Ngāpuhi.
He said that would include greater emphasis on mātauranga Māori and a localised curriculum – things the Government was moving away from with its curriculum and qualification reforms.
It would allow the school more flexibility in its ability to pay staff who were not qualified teachers, but had other skills and knowledge.
“For some time now, in spite of our best efforts around strategic targets with achievement, attendance and retaining our kids and that type of thing we haven’t been able to get the shift in those areas that we want to,” he said.
“So we think that charter school conversion would provide us with greater levels of flexibility around what we might be able to do to improve engagement and attendance and achievement for our kids and with our our community.”
Post Primary Teachers Association president Chris Abercrombie said it was disappointing that a state school felt the state could not support it to meet its community’s needs.
He said the union, which opposed charter schools, would support its members in any consultation and would continue to support them if the school converted to charter status.
Abercrombie said it was telling that so far only one state school had admitted that it was considering converting.
“It sort of just says what is the point of this charter school system. Why are we spending time and money on this when educators don’t want it, schools mostly don’t want it, there’s been very little uptake and the only ones there have been are very small, very specialised schools.”
He said the union was aware of only one other school that wanted to convert: Al-Madinah.
Allen said Northland College’s board began discussing the possibility of charter conversion about 12 months ago – before a recent damning Education Review Office report that indicated statutory intervention was needed.
He said the report was a surprise because the school had a commissioner 10 years ago but was removed from the review office’s list of high-need schools at the end of 2023.
Allen said the report was a reminder the school needed to try something different.
“A charter school offers us the opportunity to have a conversation, a genuine conversation about what success looks like for our community. Because success is not 100% about every kid achieving University Entrance.
“People talk about the tail in education and for far too long it’s been poor and brown. It’s as simple as that, and in spite of everyone’s best efforts from national-level down, that has not changed.”
Allen said the iwi’s sponsorship was “incredibly significant”.
“It’s a genuine opportunity for our iwi to take a lead in the education space,” he said.
“I think we find ourselves at a time and in a situation now where it’s imperative that we start looking for opportunities, that we start looking for opportunities to actually walk the talk around our tino rangatiratanga and our mana motuhake and I think this could be a pathway that leads us to where we need to get to.”
Te Rūnanga-Ā-Iwi-O-Ngāpuhi chair Mane Tahere said the iwi had a dedicated seat on the school’s board and becoming its charter sponsor was a natural progression.
Tahere said he hoped the iwi could help provide the sort of all-encompassing marae, hapū and iwi involvement that had helped kura kaupapa Māori be so successful.
He said that sort of environment was difficult to achieve as a state school.
“We’re wanting to really grow the educational excellence for Ngāpuhi, for our towns. It really is a reset time for the school and the runanga in the education space.”
Rūnanga general manager Moana Tuwhare said the problems the school faced were not isolated, and the rūnanga daily dealt with problems including addiction, violence and unemployment – “the classical indicators of poverty and oppression”.
She said as sponsor, the organisation would be able to bring its organisational and governance skills to bear, as well as its social and health services, to help the school and the community generally.
“We think we can co-locate some of those services inside the school so there’s direct access to some of those wrap-around supports that our families need,” she said.
“We’ve got the ability to make it a school for Ngāpuhi,” she said, explaining that did not mean it would be exclusively for the iwi but rather a school that had a Ngāpuhi identity.
“It used to be back in the day, and this is probably a longer-term vision, a boarding school. The roll used to be in the thousands and if we could build it back to a place where our whānau regardless of where they might reside in the country or in the world can send their tamariki home for not just a high-quality education at a secondary school level, but also for a really quality education in Ngāpuhi identity, values, aspirations and so on and so forth and have that that real connection with what it means to be Ngāpuhi.”
Tuwhare said it was not clear if the iwi would contribute financially to the school.
“We have a desire to see it succeed. What that means in terms of financial commitment is still to be determined, but we will be backing it in every way, shape or form possible to make it a success,” she said.
She said there was no plan to sponsor other state schools in the area to become charters.
“We’re just very focused on making this one a success. I think before we get too far ahead of ourselves, we need to prove that this is a a successful model for local schools, but for our kids, more importantly,” she said.
“If we can make this one a success, then I’m sure they will create further opportunity for us to potentially do a similar thing elsewhere but that’s the focus, that’s not the intention at this point.”