Students miss out on trades

Funding changes mean students who attend vocational academies will be removed from school rolls. Photo / Duncan Brown

High school principals will cut the number of pupils attending popular trades academies in a bid to protect the jobs of teachers and senior management.

The academies were introduced in 2011 offering courses ranging from hospitality to carpentry for 15- and 16-year-old students who wanted to learn a trade. More than 5,200 students from 262 schools are enrolled in vocational courses at 23 academies throughout New Zealand.

But due to a funding anomaly, students have been funded as if they were at school full-time, when they are only at school part-time. The Ministry of Education says it is fixing that anomaly, where trades students have effectively been double funded for some components of funding.

In its latest newsletter, the PPTA's Secondary Principals' Council says members must consider the effect on staffing levels before deciding how many students it approves for trades academies next year.

The council has also warned that schools currently entitled to employ an associate principal might lose that right as academy students would no longer count for the 1,401-pupil threshold that triggered the position.

"We will be reducing the number of students able to be in the trade academy," Linda Fox, the council's representative on the PPTA board, told the Herald on Sunday.

"It doesn't make me feel very good at all to do that because it's going to lessen the opportunity for those students."

Fox, principal of Kelson Girls' High, said the impact would be felt most in smaller and low decile secondary schools.

She said the funding change would also affect all year 12 students in the schools involved as it would shrink subject choice in academic courses.

"In this latest situation, the ministry has only been able to increase student numbers [in academies] by taking funding from elsewhere in the system," Fox said.

"There are always winners and losers when that happens; the losers are small low-income schools in low-income communities, which need the opportunities offered by a trade academy."

Labour education spokesman Chris Hipkins described the funding change as a short-sighted, cost-saving measure.

"Schools will now effectively be penalised financially when they have pupils involved in trade academies, so participation will inevitably be discouraged," he said.

Claire Douglas, the Ministry of Education's deputy secretary for graduate achievement, vocations and careers, said the funding change was being implemented to correct an anomaly that had resulted in trades academy students being double funded.

The correction would also mean another 300 students could attend trades academies.

Douglas disputed the level of disruption on school staff saying the effect on any individual school would be small, with 80 per cent of schools experiencing little or no change.

However, the ministry's modelling showed 43 schools would lose between one and one and a half days staffing a week.

A further 10 schools would lose between two and four half-days staffing.