School snub
It’s had glowing ERO reports – so why is it struggling to attract students?
Ahigh-performing, predominantly Maori and Pasifika school says it is being snubbed by local families because of its low decile and “brown” community.
Te Papapa School, nestled in the Auckland suburb of Onehunga, has a role of 230 students — of which the principal says only one is Pakeha.
In its last Education Review Office report, the decile two primary which has no zone was rated as “an asset in the local community”, with “highly engaged students” who “make good progress and generally achieve well”.
Despite this, and the changing demographics in Onehunga — a former traditional blue collar suburb now home to many middle-income families — the roll at Te Papapa is dominated by Maori and Pacific students from low-income families, principal Robyn Curry said.
“I worry sometimes that the children who are Maori and Pasifika wonder why there’s not Pakeha children in our school — because if you walk out on the street, they live there,” Mrs Curry said. “It concerns us because we suspect that it is because we’re 99 per cent Maori, Pasifika and . . . [people] therefore make the assumption that because we’re low decile that we will be a low performing school.”
Decile ratings are used by the Ministry of Education to allocate funding based on the socio-economic status of the school community. The lower the decile rating the more government funding the school receives.
At Oranga School, a decile three primary about 1km away from Te Papapa, about one in five students was Pakeha. About 61 per cent of its 315-strong roll in 2012 were Pacific Islanders. Onehunga Primary School, which has a decile four rating and is 2km away from Te Papapa, had a slightly larger, but similar roll make-up to Oranga.
In the six years Mrs Curry had headed Te Papapa — which has a breakfast club as well as laptop facilitated learning for its senior students — the local community had changed.
“You can hardly buy a house now in Onehunga for under a million,” she said. “Even to rent — a lot of our families have been forced out of Onehunga because of the high rentals.”
Te Papapa school parents, who are loyal to their little community, have similar suspicions about ill-conceived attitudes towards the Mt Smart Rd school.
Cook Island mother Star Alberton, a former Te Papapa student, had sent three of her children to the school.
“People stereotype, but my daugh- ter went there and she’s excelling.”
The New Zealand Educational Institute said many parents failed to understand the decile system was not an evaluation of the quality of teaching and education at a school.
Executive member Lynda Stuart said any review into the system should consider what impacts decile ratings had on how schools were perceived — however it was important to ensure any funding system was based on achieving equality in schools. Education Minister Hekia Parata has previously described the decile system as a “blunt instrument”, and said it was being looked at as part of a wider review of school funding.