Rules likely to curb school choices
Zoning control may lock more kids into their local schools
AGovernment takeover of school zoning may lock more students into attending their local schools — although schools that take out-of-zone students hope they will still be allowed to do so.
A new Education Support Agency will take over zoning and enrolment schemes from the boards of individual schools in the next 18 months to two years, under a new plan for running schools unveiled by Education Minister Chris Hipkins.
Existing students, including 17,000 Auckland secondary school students who currently live outside the zones of the schools they attend, are expected to be “grandparented” so they don’t have to change schools.
But Hipkins’ policy document says the current system where schools draw up their own zones has meant “schools can manipulate the enrolment zone based on areas they most wish to take students from, for example making zones that include high socio-economic neighbourhoods and exclude closer, more disadvantaged neighbourhoods”.
The zoning takeover is the most significant change in the final outcome of a review of school governance that began with a taskforce proposal a year ago for regional education “hubs” to take over “all the legal responsibilities and liabilities currently held by . . . boards of trustees”.
After an outcry from many schools and the National Party, the Government has decided to leave school boards with all their existing powers except zoning.
Auckland Primary Principals Association vice-president Stephen Lethbridge said it was disheartening that the original taskforce proposals had been “watered down” so much that they would have little impact on many schools.
His school, Pt Chevalier Primary, is already full with in-zone students so it will not be affected by the zoning changes, but he supports the change in principle. “I think for equity, kids need to go to their local schools and there needs to be support for all schools,” he said.
Secondary Principals Association president Deidre Shea said the zoning change would be contentious in some places, but she did not expect it would affect her school, Onehunga High School, even though 53 per cent of its students last year came from outside its zone — mainly from Mangere. Massey High School principal Glen Denham said parents would still find ways to send their children to the schools they wanted.
“It’s all very well to say it [zoning] is going to be held regionally. It just seems to me another big layer of bureaucracy in the middle.”
Auckland Grammar School headmaster Tim O’Connor commended Hipkins for scrapping the proposed “hubs” but said he had “failed to present a definitive way forward”.