High Achiever: Uenuku Fairhall

Uenuku Fairhall: Principal at Te Kuru o Te Koutu
Uenuku Fairhall did not learn Maori until his third year at university, but as principal at Te Kura o Te Koutu, he is helping today's young people build a strong te reo base from a young age.
He has been principal at the school since 1998 after trying to balance the roles of kura chairperson and head of the bi-lingual unit at Western Heights High School became too frustrating.
"I was developing strong ideas of where I wanted the kura to go, but I didn't want to be a chairman breathing down the principal's neck. I resigned and applied for the job here."
The school currently has 205 students, from new entrants to Year 13 senior secondary pupils.
"I really enjoy teaching them the process of learning and watching them grow up. If there is a student in Year 10 who is frustrating me, I can look back to how they were in Year 6 and realise they have actually come a long way."
Acceptance and tolerance of other ways of thinking is something Uenuku believes he is getting better at with age. This is partly due to his experiences in Latin America where he has travelled on an education scholarship and visited with groups from the kura.
"I really like the people there and their acceptance of the way people are. Sometimes they are too accepting, but the experience has really helped me develop patience with teenagers and other young people."
Moving from Tauranga Boys' High School to lead the new bilingual unit at Western Heights gave Uenuku his first taste of being in charge - being able to follow up his ideas and get others involved.
"I discovered I liked that."
But his first experience of bilingualism actually took place in Canada. His father worked in forestry and the family moved there when he was eight, at the time when Canada was becoming bilingual and going through quite a revolution.
This left a lasting impression on young Uenuku.
He didn't speak much Maori when the family left, but Christmas gifts from back home always included some Maori books and he developed an interest. At age 12, he even tried to translate a book of Greek mythology into Maori using a dictionary.
"I had no idea about the grammar or sentence structure or anything - I just worked through it word by word translating English to Maori."
Even when he returned to New Zealand, his interest in languages led him into Spanish and Chinese before his grandmother convinced him to learn his native Maori in his third year at university.
"I loved it - it really meant something to me.
"I was very lucky as many of my uncles were still alive and I had the chance to talk with them in te reo, even if they teased me for speaking 'university Maori'."
He brought his own children up with Maori as their first language, which he says has never held them back from achieving anything, although the te reo patterns do show through in their English.
"It is interesting watching them as adults to see how their English is growing now they spend more time in that environment."
Uenuku believes the total immersion environment of the kura is important in developing Maori as a first language for children.
"When it comes to language we have an inner core that we develop and everything else is an assault on that."
By surrounding children and teachers with the Maori language every day, they build a strong core that will survive such assaults from other languages.
Students at the kura begin studying Spanish in year 5, but do not learn English until year 7 and Uenuku says this is because students are not exposed to Spanish elsewhere so it does not challenge the building of that core, whereas they are surrounded by English in other parts of their lives so that is not introduced until that strong core has been created.