Schools back calls for funding boost and overhaul of support for most vulnerable students

Schools and alternative education experts are backing calls for a funding boost and overhaul of support for the most vulnerable and sometimes most difficult students.

An Education Review Office report published on Tuesday said most of the 8000 teens enrolled in various forms of alternative education left without any qualifications and too many went on to benefits or crime.

It recommended an entirely new and better-funded model for helping students who left school or were kicked out due to behavioural, mental health or learning difficulties.

The report said as a first step the government should try to reverse the growing number of alternative education enrolments by providing more support for schools.

Secondary Principals Association president Louise Anaru told RNZ that would help.

"If we had these resources in schools we could hire social workers for instance, specialist teachers, teacher aides and we could resource a learning programme, a short-term adaptive learning programme, aligned to the students' needs and then transition them back into the classroom, but keeping them on-site and in school," she said.

The report said most of the growth in alternative education happened at Te Kura the Correspondence School but online learning did not work well for struggling teens who needed in-person support.

It recommended a new model of alternative education with more registered teachers and opportunities to study the full curriculum at or near a school site and with better funding.

That had implications for alternative education providers who ran small group, face-to-face programmes for about 2000 students a year.

Dr Lloyd Martin had worked in alternative education since the 1980s and recently completed doctoral research on the subject.

He said he agreed the system needed an overhaul, but maybe not the one ERO had in mind.

"If more teachers and more curriculum was the answer then why didn't school work," he said.

"The real issue with alternative education is the intersection between learning and developmental stuff which addresses kids with trauma and neurodiversity and so on."

Martin said teacher aides and social workers did a lot of the heavy lifting in alternative education but pay rates were low and they were hard to hold on to.

He said the entire purpose of alternative education needed a rethink.

"Some schools see alternative education simply as a dumping ground to get rid of their disruptive kids. Ministry of Education tend to think AE is about fixing kids up and getting them back to school. Neither of those are particularly helpful or realistic positions," he said.

"There's a bunch of kids who need to learn in different settings, for all sorts of reasons, and there's nothing wrong with the kids it's just that the school system doesn't match their needs."

Martin said alternative education needed to be seen as a valid destination for kids for whom school did not work, rather than a temporary fix.

Alternative Education providers were paid about $16,536 per enrolment, less than half what a secondary school received per student and ERO said it was not enough.

The head of the correspondence school Te Kura agreed more needed to be done to support students who were kicked out or dropped out of mainstream school.

The correspondence school Te Kura, has had rapid growth in its roll, from 3000 full time enrolled students in 2016 to 9000 in 2024.

Chief executive of Te Kura, Te Rina Leonard, told Checkpoint it welcomed the report identifying issues in the system.

"To really put a highlight on this shared challenge across the education system. We welcome the discussion, we agree with the recommendations around having a greater focus on prevention."

Some students joined the school dealing with significant mental health issues, and had missed a lot of school time, Leonard said.

But she denied the school had become a dumping ground for students who weren't succeeding in mainstream education.

"Not at all... we all have a role to play in supporting young people to find their pathway through education."

The school had managed to increase engagement with at-risk students by ten percent, Leonard said.

"Which I think is a real win. Do we need to do more? Absolutely. We're in the process at the moment of working out what are the different types of support for kids needs."

Michael Smith from Porirua provider Praxis said it was a long-standing problem.

"We struggle away doing a hell of a lot of fund-raising," he said.

"We're fund-raising somewhere between $150-200,000 a year just to keep the doors open. At least for alternative education and activity centre provision I don't think that's understood well."

Smith said the government needed to consider why the secondary school system was not working for some learners.

"Things seem to be going fine for a kid when they were at primary school and at intermediate. There might be a few little rumblings away but then when they get to high school, why do the wheels fall off so fast. What's happening in our system that's not conducive to a young person having a successful education journey," he said.

Education Minister Erica Stanford said the report was good and it was time to reimagine what a good pathway looked like for students who had disengaged from school.

She said an advisory group told her young people might need help getting driver's licences or introductory polytechnic courses.

"There are some great possibilities there but we've just got to work through that process," she said.