Feature
All due credit
by Leah Haines
By embracing Maoriness, a decile 1 school has had a life changing effect on its students.
For years, the people of Flaxmere have endured their own brain drain as hundreds of local teenagers bus out of the Hastings satellite suburb in the hope of a better education in town.
But, as their buses chug past orchards on Ironside Rd each morning, Brittnay Kershaw and a growing number of others pass from the opposite direction, heading away from town towards the once-maligned Flaxmere College.
Brittnay, 16, who struggled at her last school, is on track to fly through NCEA Level 1 and has big plans for the future.
As recently as 2005, it might have defied logic to send your child into the heart of one of the New Zealand’s poorest suburbs, where barely 14% of students met the most basic literacy requirements at Year 11, only 10 students gained NCEA Level 1 and just one student got University Entrance.
But in just over two years Flaxmere College has transformed the life chances of its 300 students. Last year, 57 gained NCEA Level 1 and 29 got Level 2 (up from 15 in 2005). In the past two years, 15 students left with UE, several went on to tertiary study, and even more are expected to gain top qualifications this year.
Ranked decile 1a – the poorest on the Education Ministry’s scale – the school in the heart of gang territory now exceeds even the national averages in literacy and numeracy, with 74% making the literacy grade and more than 95% the numeracy.
The school motto at the front gate boasts “Good things are happening here”. And from inside the school that’s beginning to look like an understatement.
Flaxmere’s turnaround has been so dramatic that it still leaves principal Nigel Hanton a bit breathless in his enthusiasm to spread the good word. “We are saying, ‘Wow! We’ve got our shit together here because what we set out to do we are achieving.’”
So, what’s changed? First, the leadership: Hanton and his deputy, Daniel Murfitt, arrived in 2004.
But they’ll also tell you the school has embraced its Maoriness. With a roll of more than 70% Maori, Flaxmere undertook a seismic cultural shift, adopting a tikanga Maori approach to almost every aspect of the school. “Kids then find their place in the school because it’s not so different from their experiences,” says Hanton.
And the culture shift didn’t stop at tikanga. Flaxmere adopted what Hanton and Murfitt call a “credit culture”. Stop any student and ask how many credits they have towards NCEA and they will tell you. Hanton and Murfitt say that rather than being de-motivating – as critics suggest it could be – the credit culture has the opposite effect, because students realise what they can achieve.
Alongside this has been a school-wide focus on literacy and numeracy and a “modularisation” of the curriculum – breaking subjects down into term-long units of learning. It’s been particularly effective for the huge numbers of transient students in the school (20% of the year 11 students this year).
Hanton is unapologetic that a focus on internally assessed Unit Standards, makes this possible. “There is a lagging mindset that there is something that is deemed to be superior about some form of examination that says you got 97 and I got 96 so you’re better than me. We believe that every student in this school is unique and their qualification is unique to them.”
Having teachers manage several levels in every class means focusing on popular subjects and leaving some students – like head girl Angelia Hura who plans to study bio medical science at Victoria University next year – to gain some higher level credits through correspondence.
