Indicators and Reporting
Unit, Ministry of Education, Wellington, 2009.106 Masterton District 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 Full Primary 634 638 1121 1007 1015 990 977 1000 385 Contributing 1831 1807 1374 1235 1186 1199 1147 1179 459 Intermediate 576 582 479 429 404 382 412 407 277 Yr 7 – 15 696 697 748 785 806 843 865 843 265 Secondary 1692 1707 1731 1723 1767 1684 1639 1611 335 Composite 29 25 14 122 138 109 82 62 137 Teen Parent Unit 19 19 21 25 24 24 19 TOTALS 5458 5475 5486 5342 5321 5337 5146 5126 2952 During Trevor Mallard’s term as Minister, the Ministry planned to review 1000 schools over a ten year period in the hope of reducing them by about a third. Between the Wainuiomata Review in 2000 and the moratorium in 2004 Trevor Mallard had closed or foreshadowed the closure of about 100 state schools. Although some believed he was moving too far too fast, he did not. In February 2004, soon after the increasing community opposition to school reviews was reflected in successive political polls showing that Labour had lost the lead to National, a moratorium on school reviews was announced. It was deemed politically prudent by Helen Clark and her advisors to reassign Trevor Mallard elsewhere. Trevor Mallard was replaced as Minister of Education by Steve Maharey. Trevor Mallard found the moratorium personally and politically difficult because he had to back down on something he believed in. Soon after the conclusion of the Masterton District Network Review he told a Wairarapa Times Age reporter107 that he regretted that he had been unable to persuade communities that school closures were a good use of education resources and reiterated this two months later in an interview with Virginia Larsen in her ‘North and South’ feature article: Mad Machiavellian Trevor Mallard or plain Misunderstood?108
It’s fair to say that I’m disappointed that I’ve been unable to sell the advantages of doing these reviews more quickly than would otherwise happen. I take responsibility for biting off more than I could chew.”109
Most thesis survey respondents however, did not share his perceptions:
When the Minister of Education was told to drop the merger process by Prime Minister Helen Clarke he did so immediately. If the mergers were so needed and important, surely they
should have continued instead of suddenly curtailed.110
Tomorrow’s Schools set up self-managing schools – so how come the Ministry of Education suddenly had the power to shut them? Was this the beginning of the end of “Tomorrow’s Schools?”111
The North and South feature article provides valuable insights about Trevor Mallard’s perceptions. He insisted that the network reviews were never about saving money as the dollars saved would always go back to the chalk face through improved teaching resources and equipment.
Mallard has never been afraid of fronting up in a hall bristling with hostile parents. And he was shrewd enough to start his turbo charged network review process in 2000 in his home
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patch of Wainuiomata. Nearly four years on he claims that the closures and mergers in the valley have produced significantly better resourced and managed schools.112
The Sunday Star Times October 12, 2003113 noted that it was to his credit that Trevor Mallard visited communities and braved the criticism, for example when he fronted up to howls of outrage from 700 people at the Ascot Hotel in Invercargill where he proposed that twenty-three existing primary schools become ten. Virginia Larsen checked Trevor Mallard’s perceptions about the reviews with key stakeholders in Wainuiomata where he was living when the reviews started in 2000. Rob Mill, former Principal of Wainuiomata College, which had merged with Parkway College on the Parkway site to form Wainuiomata College, agreed that the merger was very stressful at the beginning, but was convinced the outcomes had been positive. The college roll had increased from 800 to 1000 students. Instead of bussing them out of the valley to colleges elsewhere more parents were choosing to send them to the new neighbourhood college which had vastly improved buildings and teaching resources. Rob Mill endorsed the review outcomes:
Trevor took a huge amount of flak from the community when he first started this process… I don’t think there is too much flak flying around now. People are pretty satisfied with the quality of education that’s come out of the review.114
Conclusion
The Masterton District Network Review process provided the illusion of consultation. While it is true that stakeholders had the opportunity to state their preferences and prejudices, if the preferences cost money, such as the construction of two new state of the art schools on the eastern and western side of town, they sank without trace. This was a false economy. The merger of Central School and Harley Street School to form Masterton Primary School in the south east proved unworkable because the run down Central School facilities were not appropriate for a merger. The Ministry had to build a new school in the end. This showed that the Ministry had seriously underestimated the cost of the review. Two former EDI project managers explained their roles to the media. Ian Robertson believed that an EDI was an opportunity for local people to have control over change which was virtually inevitable, (the status quo is not an option argument)115while Gay Turner was reported as saying, “I don’t tell them who to amalgamate with, they tell me. We don’t have a plan.”116
This lack of a clearly structured process ‘muddied the waters’ and caused confusion to stakeholders. As one survey respondent noted, “There was no policy or booklet on the process. We learnt the importance of each step as we went through it.”117
Before the network review began several primary school principals publicly rejected the attempts of Mayor Bob Francis to include the wider community in the discussions about future educational provision in the district. The consultation process largely took place at organised meetings within the school communities and with the Inter- LEAD facilitators, therefore it could be argued that stakeholders spent a lot of time talking to themselves. While the Masterton Town Hall can accommodate 650 people, the April 2003 meeting attended by Trevor Mallard for the ‘in crowd’ was attended by only ninety-five principals, trustees, teachers and a sprinkling of parents and community members.
A deeply flawed process inevitably produces negative social outcomes. The outcome of the review divided the community along clear lines. It set schools against one another. It accentuated the east west divide. Many parents who disagreed with the review outcomes contested them by staging a silent protest through voting with
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their feet and enrolling their children in the smaller schools on the rural/urban periphery, thereby destabilising the projected rolls in the remaining town schools. As a result all of the remaining state primary schools in the town have a decile rating of four or less.
TABLE 24.
DECILE DATA FOR PRIMARY SCHOOLS IN THE MASTERTON DISTRICT.