High hopes for education dreams
Summits pulling together 800 to air ideas on schools
Teducation he Government has raised high hopes with an “education summit” encouraging 800 people to dream of their ideal schools and preschools.
Now its challenge will be translating values into practical changes.
Even Education Minister Chris Hipkins admitted he was worried when he asked his officials two weeks ago for a programme for the Christchurch summit — the first of two aimed at kick-starting a national “education conversation”.
The second event will be in Auckland this coming weekend.
“When I got here yesterday morning and asked for a programme and they said, ‘ Sorry minister, that’s not the way we’re doing it,’ I was even more worried,” he said.
French-born master of ceremonies Philippe Coullomb, who runs Sydneybased collaboration facilitators Wheretofromhere, replaced a normal programme with “hubs” in which people sat in small groups and tried to answer broad questions such as what values they wanted our education system to be based on.
Out of 476 people who each chose 10 values from a list of 38, the top answers were: hauora/wellbeing 286, creativity 245, family/community/ whanaungatanga 223, respect 251 and belonging 212.
Summaries on whiteboards from the group discussions talked of valuing every student no matter what their culture or learning needs.
“I came here as a cynic,” said one high school teacher. “But as it went on, I got drawn into it. There is a lot of hope, which is a reflection of the fact that teachers in general have become quite jaded. These ideas have been floated in staff rooms for ages but can’t really go anywhere.
“It feels empowering but I feel I could be let down,” he said.
The broad ideas from the two summits, and from an online survey asking the public to answer four broad questions such as, “If you were the boss of education in NZ, what would you do first?”, are supposed to feed in to task forces and working groups that are reviewing early childhood education, school governance, learning support, vocational education, tertiary education and the National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA).
An over-arching advisory group headed by Children’s Commissioner
Simon Collins
Nine weeks ago, 15-year-old schoolgirl Jane Boriboon had a baby.
This weekend, she and a friend from Nelson College for Girls, Ngawiki Rotana, spoke at an education summit in Christchurch about how their lives were transformed when the college created a support house for them and eight other girls in the grounds.
They don’t live in the house, which had been vacant and has now been renamed Bronte House. The girls have some classes and extra tuition in the house but attend specialist subjects in mainstream classrooms.
But it has created a supportive space in a place that they had turned Judge Andrew Becroft has been set up to make sure the ideas from the summits and the “conversation” don’t get lost in translation.
Education Secretary Iona Holsted promised that “that authentic, clear statement of integrity of what is said here and in Auckland gets fed through to the work programme”. away from — school.
“It’s like a second home to me,” Jane said. “They are all my friends, I call them like family. They are just so supportive, you always have someone’s shoulder to cry on when you’re upset.”
Although Jane was born in New Zealand, her parents are Thai. She had a difficult childhood.
“In my early childhood, me and my brother were getting shifted between mum, dad and nana,” she said.
In her first year at college, she began drinking, taking drugs and skipping school, often attending only for the first period.
“It possibly was the crowd I was hanging with,” she said. “When I
“For example, we have a revised tertiary education strategy due by 2019. The strategy will be drafted with the language that you have been using here,” she said.
She said sometimes the ministry would make mistakes but that would not be evidence of any conspiracy.
“I undertake to have somewhere started ditching after first period I would always be with someone. We’d go and hang out with all those other troubled people.”
She became caught in a violent relationship with a partner who left her pregnant at 14.
When college special needs coordinator Emma Hunter offered to help, she was afraid at first.
“I remember the first day I went into her class I was standing behind the door, really scared to go in.”
But ironically, the pregnancy forced her to reach out and seek help.
“If it wasn’t for my baby, I don’t know where I’d be. I’d probably be off the rails, still binge-drinking.”
Ngawiki Rotana, a Year 10 student on our website that you can go to every day and be clear about where we are at with the process, and where you can keep in touch,” she said.
In a final panel, Pasifika educationalist Mele Wendt said she heard “lots of conversations around racism” at the summit.
“There is blatant bias happening in who moved to Nelson with her mum last year, leaving her dad in Hamilton, said she had attended 12 schools.
“We had to move all the time because we couldn’t afford a house.”
She suffered severe anxiety and depression, but has found at Bronte House that she is in the top 5 per cent of the population for brain functions known as executive processing.
Hunter said the college did not get enough funding for the one-on-one help the Bronte girls needed, so she turned to the community. A tutor from the polytech gives art classes, a personal trainer “gives up his time to work one-to-one with the girls”.
“We are continually looking at creative ways to help the girls.” our education system,” she said. “We have to acknowledge that this trauma, this pain, this racism and a whole lot of other awful stuff exists and we are going to have to get beyond it.
“But on the positive side, I’m really, really touched by the general support and encouragement.”