Te reo learning lifting outcomes

This country is set up to deliver a mainstream colonial education. It was designed for that purpose, the system serves that purpose. So we are bucking the trend

Murupara Maorimedium school principal Pem Bird

AUCKLAND: A Maori principal has hailed new Maorilanguage education data as showing that ‘‘learning Maori makes you clever’’.

The new data, produced by StatsNZ to mark Maori Language Week, shows that unemployed and lowincome Maori parents are the most likely to enrol their children in Maorispeaking schools.

Ministry of Education figures already showed that pupils in Maorilanguage schools were more likely than other Maori pupils to leave school with level 2 of the National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA) — 78% from Maorimedium kura against 62% of Maori pupils from Englishmedium schools in 2015.

Murupara Maorimedium school principal Pem Bird, who chairs a group of 30 kuraaiwi or triballyaligned schools, said the new figures were no surprise because betteroff Maori parents were unlikely to live close to a Maorilanguage school.

‘‘Your higherincome parents would be in areas where the population would be fundamentally pakeha people with high incomes, and they are not accessible, not having the vital numbers necessary to have a kura in that area,’’ he said.

‘‘So that’s why you get a high concentration [of kura] in places like Murupara.’’

He said the higher NCEA achievement rates in Maorilanguage kura, combined with the new demographic statistics, showed that Maori pupils learned better in te reo.

‘‘Learning Maori makes you clever, that’s what that tells you,’’ he said.

‘‘The long tail in Maori edu cation are monolingual [Englishspeaking] Maori, mainstream Maori.

‘‘This country is set up to deliver a mainstream colonial education. It was designed for that purpose, the system serves that purpose. So we are bucking the trend.’’

Only 2.9% of all Maori schoolleavers attended Maorimedium schools, and until now it was thought that those pupils might be largely from betteroff Maori families whose parents cared most about education.

The new data is still not conclusive because it relates to Maori parents who had children living with them at the time of the 2013 Census and said they had children who had attended ‘‘kaupapa Maori’’ education at any stage of their lives.

‘‘Kaupapa Maori’’ education was not specifically defined in the question and parents may have interpreted the definition widely.

Only 18,054 Maori pupils, or 5.4% of all Maori primary and secondary school pupils, were actually learning in Maori more than 50% of the time last year. Nevertheless, the data does suggest that pupils learning in te reo are likely to live in families that are poorer than average.

Fully 41% of Maori parents who were unemployed at Census time said they had had children in kaupapa Maori education, compared with only 24% of Maori parents who were working fulltime and 23% of those working parttime.

And 28% of Maori parents earning less than $40,000 a year said they had had children in kaupapa Maori education, but only 23% of those earning between $40,000 and $100,000 and 16% of those on over $100,000.

Mr Bird said Maorilanguage schools had to cope with a shortage of educational resources in te reo, and he was glad to see nonMaori as well as Maori people now learning the language.