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Teenage mums at the country's 17 teen parent schools are upset about a Government review that could threaten the schools' viability.
Ministry of Education officials are due to report to Education Minister Steve Maharey at the end of this month on a proposed more "flexible and cost-effective approach"
that is expected to allow mainstream schools to bid for funding for teen parents.
The ministry currently funds up to 487 students at the 17 specialist units, which are each attached to a mainstream school but draw their students from a wide area.
Most of the students - all female aged from 14 to 24 at the time of a review published last month - do Correspondence School lessons, but with teachers available as both tutors and "second mums". They have access to their babies in on-site creches.
Rebecca Duffy, a 17-year-old student who travels from Lynfield to Auckland Girls Grammar School's Eden Campus teen parent unit in Mt Eden, said the special facility was much better for student parents than her previous school, Marist College.
She transferred when she was two months pregnant with daughter Charlotte, now 5 months.
"You can work at the pace you need and there are no deadlines for when things have to be handed in," she said.
"I couldn't have done it at Marist College. They would be expecting you to look after your baby somewhere while also working, and you'd have deadlines for your homework which would be impossible to meet while taking care of a baby.
"I would rather not go to school than go to a normal high school with other girls who now, to me, are in a completely different world which doesn't involve the amount of responsibility that ours does."
The unit's only fulltime teacher, former science teacher Janice Snellgrove, said half the unit's 28 young mothers had dropped out of their previous schools and were not in any kind of education before they heard about the Eden Campus.
"They had dropped out of school prior to being pregnant even. The school system hadn't suited them and they slipped through the net."
They come from as far afield as North Shore, Waitakere, Howick and Mangere.
"My role is mother really," Ms Snellgrove said. She also employs part-time tutors in English, maths, accountancy, chemistry and humanities, and brings in parenting specialists.
"We have people that come in and teach family planning, we've had the Body Safe rape prevention group this year, we have childcare talks and the Plunket comes in," she said.
"We have all those facilities that are helping the young children as well as the parents. If you educate the parent, the child is being educated as well."
Half the students at the country's 17 teen-parent units are Maori, 38 per cent are Pakeha, 9 per cent Pacific Islanders and 3 per cent others.
Even at Eden Campus, most of the 30 students at the last review date were either Maori (9) or Pacific (9). The rest were Pakeha.
However, the review by the Education Review Office found that only 11 of the units provided an effective education. One, at Stratford High School, raised "considerable concerns about the quality of education", and the other five were judged "partly effective".
The Ministry of Education's education management policy manager, Martin Connelly, said the units were reaching only 11 per cent of all school-aged parents and the review aimed to find ways of reaching the remaining 89 per cent.
