KEY POINTS:
Teenagers will pour through the gates of New Zealand's biggest school on Wednesday. Thousands of them. They could be forgiven for thinking they are entering a small city.
Rangitoto College on North Shore's affluent East Coast Bays has a roll which has tipped 3000. It's the biggest school
in the land.
Secondary schools around the country average 700 pupils and about 30 have rolls of more than 1600. About a dozen are near the 2000 mark and a handful of megaschools have more than 2500 students.
Christchurch's Burnside High School was the country's biggest for years. Now it has slipped behind Rangitoto but is keeping pace with Avondale College in West Auckland - both have a similar roll of between 2600 to 2700 students.
You might think it would be easy to get lost in the crowd or that maybe something intimate is lost.
Not so, say the principals of Rangitoto and Avondale, and heads from other megaschools. They all say careful structures are in place to make sure students are not just numbers.
Look down from the air at Rangitoto College and it's a sprawling mini-city. Within it are nestled the artificial hockey pitch and expansive sports fields - eight of them - scores of buildings, dozens of classrooms.
Originally envisaged as an agricultural college when the bays were farmland, the farms were carved into high-price real estate and families moved in.
Principal David Hodge says the growth of the school he has run for more than a year involves no poaching students from other schools in the area. The East Coast Bays has a range of high schools, all growing. Long Bay College to the north had a roll last year of 1686, Westlake boys and girls to the south have more than 2000. A new junior high school has already opened in nearby Albany and a senior high school for the fast-developing area is in the planning.
Hodge says the school has become so big because it can. The site is huge. Whether it grows further depends on how many more families flood into East Coast Bays.
Asked how big is too big for a school, Hodge replies a school of 400 which is not run properly is too big.
"As most guys will tell you, size doesn't matter, it's how you operate. And all the overseas research points that out as well. It's how the organisation is run that is the crucial factor."
There are advantages in such size. "We can offer an unbelievable range of courses and activities for students simply because we have so many students."
Smaller schools might struggle to offer subjects such as Spanish, Maori, tourism, media studies, automotive engineering and health.
Or take sports. Rangitoto offers 39 different sports "And we have 42 different cultural or special interest activities. There's a whole range of different choirs, from a fully fledged top choir to a small madrigal one. There's 20-something chamber orchestra groups, all at different levels, and so on."
He agrees the school is like a small city and is one of the biggest employers on the North Shore. There are 180 teachers and about 80 non-teaching staff.
Teacher-pupil ratios vary from subject to subject but they try for 1:25 or lower. The international student market - Rangitoto will have about 200 international students this year - allows the school to improve the ratio because of extra funding.
As for disadvantages, megaschools work hard to minimise them. Rangitoto has a "very intensive" pastoral care system which includes a peer-support system and a strong tutor system.
"So students have teachers who are primary caregivers almost, who take a keen interest in each individual student within that class. We've got peer support where Year 13 students buddy up with students who are starting.
"We've got a comprehensive guidance system, we have a dean system which looks after the academic needs of the students. The school is very, very organised."
It is run like a school, not like a business, Hodge says, but there is a full-time accountant and a full- time property manager, which smaller schools simply cannot afford.
Hodge came from Tamaki College - with a roll of around 700 - so Rangitoto is a big change. But again, he says, there are strengths and weaknesses.
He reckons there are around 200 people at Rangitoto who have university degrees: "I often say to people, 'go into the staffroom here and there's an expert on just about anything you like to name'."
In some parts of the United States, city mayors have become involved in downsizing huge city schools, but in America many of the large schools are in poor areas and have associated behavioural problems .
In New Zealand, schools in poorer communities tend to be smaller. Schools in wealthy communities, like decile 10 East Coast Bays, tend to be large.
Over in West Auckland, Avondale College principal Brent Lewis is incredibly proud of his megaschool. He plans on holding the school roll at around 2600/2700 where it has been for the past few years in order to not overwhelm the facilities.
Lewis has run smaller schools, too, but says the opportunities offered at Avondale are amazing.
There is a professional recording studio, a climbing wall, squash courts. There are more than 800 computers.
"You do need business skills to run such a big school," he says.
After he had been a principal he went back to university and completed an MBA, upping his business skills.
"There's an element of running a company, there's an element of running a small town and there's an element of being a politician."
Lewis has five deputy principals, five deans, five assistant deans, 3.5 counsellors, a business manager, an accountant, about 170 teachers and a further to 40 support staff.
He says that despite its size, Avondale College has an incredible sense of family. When a head boy died on the sports field a couple of years ago they closed the school on the day of the funeral and told the students they could stay home. The service was held at the school and more than 2000 people turned up, the students all in uniform.
Identity and the sense of family is one thing, but Lewis also says the academic ethos is strong. The school is decile 5 but actually contains a wide range of socio-economic backgrounds: "Our kids pour into Auckland university, into all faculties."
Lewis says big schools are not better because they are big.
"They got big because they were good."
The Education Review Office, which regularly reviews the performance of all schools, has found no correlation between school size in terms of performance or achievement by students. There are good schools of all sizes and in all decile ratings, they say.
The Post Primary Teachers' Association's new president, Robin Duff, would agree. In one of his first actions in his post, he is calling for an urgent look at class size. But not school size.
He taught for 32 years at Burnside High School in Christchurch, set up in 1960 as a prototype because of the cost savings associated with putting large numbers of students on one site.
The organisation and structure of the school ensures it works.
But there are some concerns about the rise of the megaschool
Dr John Langley, the dean of Education at the University of Auckland, says he has no quarrel with their effectiveness but worries that in some areas big, popular schools "cannibalise' students from other schools.
In a country the size of New Zealand it is "absurd" to have some schools which are three times bigger than others close by, he says.
He would like discussion on changing school structures - where every school is a stand-alone entity with its own governance structure delivering the same curriculum - to a fairer method.
"An alternative possibility would develop community education clusters of schools" with different schools specialising in different areas.
"It might also be that if a school in that cluster was struggling, rather than having other schools cannibalise the students, they would all be collectively responsible for working out what was going wrong and trying to work with that school in terms of putting it right."
Some schools become very popular schools and are successful. And success breeds success. But the issue is fairness, Langley says.
Every child in the land is entitled to the best quality education possible.
"And we will always have winner and loser schools as long as we have the current governance, management and funding systems."
