Teachers target Pacific student failure rates

The New Zealand Post Primary Teachers' Association (PPTA) says more character schools than charter schools will uplift Pacific and Māori student achievement rates.

The government's $153 million plan will set up 50 charter schools over the next four years, 35 of which being state school conversions with the remaining 15 built from the ground up.

Speaking to William Terite on Pacific Mornings, PPTA Te Wehengarua national executive member Austen Pageau said charter schools were redundant since character schools existed.

"A bespoke learning environment can be a good thing. [But] we have designated character schools so we already have that in the Education Act."

Some Pacific peoples have argued that charter schools will solve the Pacific student under-achievement rates due to the autonomy of designing curriculums with a cultural lens.

Figures show Pacific and Māori success in the University Entrance dropped from 40 per cent to 34 per cent between 2020 and 2022, compared to half of the rest of the country.

In May, ACT's David Seymour criticised the previous government for failing Pacific and Māori children, saying then-Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern "heartlessly scrapped" their earlier proposal of charter school reintroduction "in favour of helping her union mates".

However, Pageau said that character schools could also tailor curriculums for particular communities like charter schools while maintaining protections that charter schools threatened.

He pointed to Kura Kaupapa Māori as an example, where Te Kura Māori o Ngā Tapuwae reported the highest NCEA pass rate of any NZ state school last year.

"The Official Information Act, the Ombudsman's oversight, the collective agreement - all of these protections are still there," he said.

"You can have the flexibility and the protections. You can have the best of both worlds."

Watch the full interview via 531pi’s FB page below:

The Council of Trade Unions told RNZ that charter schools would break labour, human rights and free trade provisions.

NZEI Te Riu Rou also listed the differences between public and charter schools, saying the former is exempt from the Official Information Act.

Furthermore, charter school sponsors are absolved from the Education and Training Act to give effect to Te Tiriti o Waitangi which sits with school boards.

European charter school results
Pageau said overseas charter schools were not working and that after 30 years, Sweden has abandoned its privately-run schools funded by public money, similar to charter schools, and declared it a "system failure".

In the United Kingdom, 80 per cent of secondary schools, 40 per cent of primary schools and 44 per cent of special schools are charter schools called academies.

NZEI Te Riu Rou spoke to a UK-based teacher who warned that the conversion to charter schools had not improved the achievement rates.

Pageau acknowledged problems in the current education system but said the solution was having more designated character schools alongside better professional development for teacher.

The verdict: 'More designated character schools'
He added that charter schools would not uplift parents' choices in schooling considering the findings of New Zealand Council for Educational Research's (NZCER) report.

The NZCER found that 89 per cent of parents' youngest children attended their first choice school, with 71 per cent of parents and whānau said their child attended primary or intermediate schools closest to them, up from 63 per cent in 2016.

Pageau said parents were not starved for choice in schools considering NZ had state-integrated schools, Kura Kaupapa Māori, designated character schools, and co-ed and single-sex schools.

He said many schools had up to 80 per cent of their students living outside their enrolment zone, meaning kids were not inhibited from attending schools outside their zone except on a few occasions.

"There already is a huge amount of choice and if we need to add more then more designated character schools is the direction in which we should go."