Research Design

3.5.1 Survey

The intention was to send a 30 question anonymous survey to all of the schools in the Wellington region. While this seemed a relatively simple process the reality was quite different. Many schools did not respond at all to my request, some who did said they were too busy to be involved at this time, or they said they had never had to suspend,

Nu m be rs of pe op le

exclude or expel a student so didn’t even attempt the survey; some did not have a working email, or the one they had given the MoE was out of date. A number said they would pass the details on but for the largest proportion of recipients, I had no feedback one way or another as to whether or not the link to the survey was passed on or just deleted. In a later discussion I had with a principal (personal communication, September, 2011) we discussed this situation and he told me that schools get a ‘huge number’ of surveys and questionnaires from the MoE and they are really ‘surveyed out’. So without the compulsion of compliance on my side I could understand why so many did not respond and their lack of enthusiasm or willingness to complete my survey was less a reflection on my research request or survey quality and more about their workload.

Previous comments notwithstanding the survey does still provide a more quantitative measure of the responses from schools in the Wellington region but is not a ‘pure’ quantitative tool, as there are qualitative questions asked that allow for a personal comment from respondents. As mentioned in the paragraph above, of the 243 schools in the Wellington region to which I attempted to send the survey, 31 schools had no email addresses identified by the MoE and an additional 25 schools had email accounts that bounced back my survey invitation with addressee not found. In effect this meant that the survey entered approximately 187 school email boxes giving a potential respondent pool of approximately 1100 trustees; I received 79 responses.

The final version of the survey in Appendix C was constructed using the Qualtrics survey tool, was proofed and edited by a statistician from the Department of Statistics and was trialled by a previous board chair who had stepped down from the position and would not be completing the actual survey. The survey was then emailed to each school for dissemination to the principal, board chair and members for completion.

3.5.2 Case study - focus group

The final question in this survey provided an opportunity for potential participants for the focus groups to express their willingness to be involved. The final question asked if the respondent would be prepared to be part of a focus group. They were asked to

reply to my Victoria University of Wellington email address where I was able to follow up with them about their participation. I did not expect this to take too long as I had broadened the catchment to cover schools in the decile 1-3 range and schools in the 8- 10 range. Each of the four participating schools was to be asked if I could have some time in their next board meeting for the discussion. These boards would discuss in greater detail their experiences of being a part of a disciplinary committee and what, if anything, they would like to see happen to improve the process and potential outcomes for children and themselves.

The plan was that four schools would provide the basis of the case study with two schools from low decile areas and two from high decile areas with one each from schools represented in each of the decile areas. The questions outlined in appendix D are the actual questions I asked of the participants, additional questions were only asked when I needed to more completely understand what they were saying. In the end I only asked the questions in Appendix D as most interviews took around 45 minutes and I was conscious that I had said they would only take 20-25 minutes. Having said that it was my perception that my interviewees would have been happy to continue talking as they all appeared interested in sharing their views and passionate about their respective roles on the board.

3.5.3 Policy review

The Effective Governance booklet (Ministry of Education, 2010b) recommends that schools have a school discipline policy that allows the professional teaching staff to develop a set of responsibilities and consequences in accordance with the policy for how the school will deal with discipline issues. My intention was to review the discipline policies from each of the focus group schools who volunteered to be part of the case study, the two board chairs and the principal and compare them. As expected the documents were based on the Ministry guidelines but they did vary with respect to how they incorporated the schools values. A fuller discussion of this will be included in the findings section.