Te reo reaches Auckland Grammar
“Just being able to be comfortable in your own skin, it sort of sets a platform for many other things,” says final-year Auckland Grammar student Nikau Reti-Beazley.
Nikau, 18, attended Ma¯orispeaking ko¯hanga and kura in Glen Innes and Mt Albert and chose to board at the InZone hostel to get into the Grammar zone.
But when he arrived in 2013, Auckland Grammar was one of 39 New Zealand secondary schools that did not teach te reo Ma¯ori at all.
Nikau has helped to change that. In his second year there, he and another boy were allowed to study te reo by correspondence.
Headmaster Tim O’Connor says this coincided with a wider curriculum review.
“Out of that process there were some suggestions that we should introduce Mandarin as a subject. When that came up, what followed was the question: if we were going to introduce Mandarin, why would we not firstly introduce te reo?” he says.
“We could find no reason why we wouldn’t introduce te reo.”
So Mandarin was deferred, and instead last year the school hired the first te reo teacher in its 148-year history, Neitana Lobb.
Lobb teaches all Year 9 students one class a week for half a year, covering tikanga Ma¯ori and basic language.
He also teaches one full subject class in Year 10, and will offer subject classes in Year 11 next year and at all five year levels by 2020.
Nikau Reti-Beazley does his own te reo study in Lobb’s Year 10 class, and helps the younger students.
“It was difficult [before],” he says. “Actually to have a staff member on site, with the resources and everything, it just makes it like a thousand times easier.”