Te reo learning on the rise
Report shows that one third of primary school children are learning Ma¯ori for at least three hours a week
Ma¯ori language is becoming part of mainstream Kiwi schooling, with almost a third of primary school students now learning in te reo for at least three hours a week.
A new Ministry of Education report shows that the numbers learning in te reo for at least three hours have jumped from 125,000 in 2010 to 171,000 last year, or from 26 per cent to 32 per cent of all primary school children.
Even Bayswater School, a mainly Pa¯keha¯ decile-10 school on Auckland’s North Shore, has moved all of its 191 children from “Taha Ma¯ori” level — a few words, greetings and songs — four years ago to all learning in te reo at least three hours a week.
“In the morning we have a class paepae [oratory],” says Years 3 and 4 teacher Allison Butcher.
“I will ask one of the children to lead karakia, a beginning-of-the-day prayer.
“Then we do the roll. We ask, ‘Kei te pe¯hea koe?’ [‘ How are you?] The children have a range of responses to that. If someone is feeling po¯uri [sad] or whakama¯ [ashamed or shy], we know who to take care of that day.
“Then one or two of the children will do a mihi [ greeting], a pepeha [personal introduction], then we do a waiata [song] in response. Then our academic day starts.”
All the teachers have completed or are doing courses at Te Wa¯nanga o Aotearoa, and intersperse English and te reo Ma¯ori through their teaching.
Morning tea and lunchtime start with senior students saying a karakia mo¯ te kai [blessing of food] over the intercom. Students in each class
stand up when they hear it and say their own karakia.
Another karakia ends the day. Principal Lindsay Child says the changes stem from a community consultation four years ago in which parents “very strongly indicated that they would like more te reo Ma¯ori in our school”.
Unusually for a North Shore school, 28 per cent of Bayswater’s children are Ma¯ori and some come to school from Ma¯ori-speaking ko¯hanga reo. “We really felt we were not progressing those children and making it [te reo] available to all children,” Child says.
Her first step was to bring in Te Reo Tuatahi, a local trust which sends a teacher in one day a week to provide language lessons.
“But that didn’t lift the level of te reo Ma¯ori very much. One lesson once a week isn’t adequate,” she says.
A bigger breakthrough came when a parent took over the school’s kapa haka group and the teachers started learning te reo themselves. Child moved kapa haka practices into class time, giving it “high status” in the school, so all Years 1-2 children now take part and a majority of the older children choose
to participate.
“During that time, the children who don’t go to kapa haka are also learning their pepeha and waiata,” she says.
All NZ teachers are now required by the Teaching Council’s teaching standards to “practise and develop the use of te reo and tikanga Ma¯ori”, and teacher training programmes must “monitor and support competency in te reo Ma¯ori”.
Child says many school principals, when they attest that their teachers are following the required standards, “just paid lip service” to those requirements. “We have made that a true part of what we do and teach,” she says. “Every year our teachers do reflect on how they have improved in their own understanding of those areas, and set themselves goals to improve further each year.”
Anaru Morgan, a former Kihikihi School principal who supports Bayswater’s progress through the Principals’ Federation’s Ma¯ori Achievement Collaborative, says the aim is to “normalise” te reo in everyday interactions.
“The problem with the old way of doing it in lessons is that a lot of Ma¯ori and Pa¯keha¯ kids are going to get to Year 6, say, and say, ‘Oh, this sucks, it’s boring,”’ he says.
“The kids were learning about colours and basic numbers in Year 1 and the teachers were teaching the same things [in every subsequent year]. That was not developing the everyday motivated use of language.”
Some other schools are more advanced than Bayswater. The old Papakura South School, where 86 per cent of students are Ma¯ori, changed its name in 2013 to Kereru Park Campus and plans to apply in September to become a “kura-a-iwi” with secondary as well as primary classes.
“We have about 60 tamariki in our level 1 full immersion class and 150 at level 3 [ on the Ma¯ori language scale], which means 30 to 50 per cent of the school day is in Ma¯ori,” says principal George Ihimaera.
“We started with pa¯ngarau [maths]. They learnt the kupu [words] of the different areas within that. When we moved into literacy, where they were giving more of their own ideas and sharing more of their own experiences, that was a bit more in depth.”
Ihimaera says many newer principals are following the same path, although the proportion of all primary school children learning in Ma¯ori at least half the time has crept up much more slowly, from 2.9 per cent of students in 2010 to 3.4 per cent last year.
“I see these young principals starting to fill the gaps,” he says. “It does fill me with optimism that there is a new wave of principals coming through that really want to buy into the whole kaupapa [programme] of delivering an effective Ma¯ori kaupapa for our tamariki.”
It does fill me with optimism that there is a new wave of principals coming through that really want to buy into the whole kaupapa of delivering an effective Ma¯ori kaupapa for our tamariki.
Kereru Park Campus principal George Ihimaera