Cool head to handle zone goal

John Morris says he is just being himself when playing the role of headmaster. Picture / Brett Phibbs

Even though John Morris, headmaster of Auckland Grammar, will be spending his day on a chilly sideline, he is wearing a smart jacket, a tie, and trousers with creases so sharp you could cut yourself.

After being interviewed he will return to his hotel room and put on clothes more appropriate for watching his Grammar boys play soccer and hockey in the winter tournament week - the reason he is in Hawkes Bay for the day and in Christchurch the day after I see him.

On the sideline he is very headmasterly. "I try not to shout. But at times, with sports that I know, it's hard not to shout." He is a former All White goalie so you can see he might be tempted to get a bit excited. "But I keep a restrained profile, which I have to."

That he has gone to the trouble to put on the right clothes for being interviewed comes as no surprise. He believes in doing the right thing. But, really, I wouldn't have minded a bit if he'd turned up in his casual clobber. "Oh, no," he says, "a bit scruffy for you, Michele." Actually, I would rather have enjoyed seeing what his idea of casual clobber is. I wouldn't have been a bit surprised if his track-suit pants had creases. He says he is not obsessive about anything other than his job, but he is a tidy chap.

Doing the right thing for Morris this week has meant doing an odd thing for a headmaster: kicking good kids out of school. He says they are all good kids, the 51 whose tenure at the school is being tested because they have been, or may have been, falsely enrolled, or because families have since moved out of the Grammar zone. And if they were top scholars, or a member of the 1st XV? "Look, the tragedy is that they're all good kids, because it goes without saying that if parents are prepared to get their kids to Grammar, they really want their kids to do well there. So there's not one who was asked to leave that you could call a ratbag." What a shame. "Ha, ha, well you can't play favourites, can you? We have asked boys to leave who are in 5A and they're the absolute top academics and it's sad."

Still, I can't help wondering whether the zone cheats prove the point which, I say, he's been banging on about for ages: That the zoning system doesn't work for Grammar and it is applying the legislation with what looks like gusto.

He would certainly not say he had been "banging on about it. But we've certainly been lobbying."

"This is a process set down by the Ministry; it's not our process." But Grammar is applying the process stringently. "Yes." Whereas other schools are not? "That is probably true."

He says that this is because Grammar has a bigger problem and that this is because Grammar is such a successful school. "It's got a history and a tradition that people like. Elsewhere, zoning may work for schools; it certainly doesn't work for us."

What he means, I think, is that the school is a victim of its own success - he is very good at PR, although he denies being any such thing. So people keep moving into the zone and if they can't, pretend they have so their boys can go to Morris' school.

Lobbying, or banging on, whatever he wants to call it, applying the legislation so rigidly, showing that the zoning system doesn't work, does rather prove his point. "What point?" That it ain't working. "Well, it's not working for us."

So the worse he can show it to be, the more credence is given to his argument. "It may well be, but we didn't go to the press about this, the press came to us. People are seeing what's happening and saying, 'Hey, this is crazy. What's happening here?"'

He hadn't seen the morning's Herald with another story about the "zone cheats" so he asks to look at mine. He scans it and says, "Seems fair." Thank goodness for that. I don't think I would care to be instructed to visit his office, although he says he wouldn't shout or be cold. He would simply be "disappointed," which is much, much worse.

He is something worse than disappointed with Metro magazine for publishing a story which rated Auckland's Top 25 schools and Grammar didn't make the list. I ask if he'd gone ballistic but he says he didn't, although "my blood did boil a bit". He sent out a letter to parents and guardians which made reference to "a lot of envy and jealousy directed towards Auckland Grammar School by other less successful schools and by sections of the media".

I hadn't seen this letter before going to see him, but this envy, or the "so many urban myths about Grammar," is something he raises.

These are myths of elitism, and that "we don't care for anybody else and that we do our own thing. Well, we do do our own thing because we believe that's what's best for our kids." These myths are put about, he says, by "people who have never seen the place, have never seen me. You know, there are lots of people who have written stories about the place and have never been there." Which is clever, because if he doesn't think this article seems fair, he will be able to say it's more nonsense because I've never seen the place.

I have had quite a good look at its headmaster, though. He seems a perfectly personable fellow, although, as I say, I wouldn't want to be on the wrong side of the headmaster's table. He talks fast, a leftover, perhaps, from all that goalie talk from inside the net. "Goalkeepers talk a lot. So that the back playing in front of you knows exactly where the players and the ball is." He thinks in a structured, linear way - his subject was history.

He gets flustered only once and that is when I ask him whether the boys have a nickname for him. They do: JMo. "Don't ask me why." I can't, for a moment, think why they might call him this either. Perhaps, I suggest, it's a play on JLo. "No! No. Well, you never know. It could be. No. I've lost my track now."

Whatever the boys mean by it, they know better than to say it in his hearing. They wouldn't, but if they did he would say, "Show some respect."

He says he is just being himself when he's playing the role of headmaster. He doesn't put on "airs and graces", but the headmaster at daily assembly, say, is slightly more formal than the headmaster at home.

He is, in many ways - and not just because of his soccer background - an unlikely head for Grammar. He is not an old boy. He took over the school in 1993 and still seems to be pinching himself with delight and a measure of disbelief at having landed his dream job. His bricklayer father and seamstress mother emigrated to New Zealand when Morris was 13. He's the working-class boy who won a scholarship to both the local grammar in Manchester and to a private school.

His mother, "showing her true working-class roots here; it was outside of her comprehension", said he was going to the grammar and that was that. His parents had both left school at 13. His job is, he thinks, still somewhat beyond his 86-year-old mother's comprehension.

"I don't think she quite understands the significance of it. She's a very simple person."

In other ways he is the embodiment of the school's ethos: the working-class boy who applied himself and made good. Although you'd have to have made good to afford a house in Grammar zone.

He is, he says emphatically, not a snob. He is not an anachronism. He introduced women teachers to Grammar. There you are, I say, "you're very go-ahead and modern."

"Of course we are. We're very progressive." He is completely taken aback when I ask if he's ever considered being head of a private school.

"Aah, I've never thought of a private school position. I mean, I've always been brought up in the state system. I've never even thought of applying, to be honest." If one came up? "There's nothing better than Grammar."

And he says he's no good at PR. "No, that's just truth; stating the fact."

He is the headmaster. It seems fair to give him the last word.