Kia ora e te whānau

Last week, I watched the Ministry of Education’s National Director of Learning Support, David Wales, interviewed on Breakfast TV about New Zealand’s high rate of bullying at school.

When asked how this rate could be lowered, he replied that, ‘Schools needed to do more’. He pointed to the 2019 ERO national research report entitled Bullying Prevention and Response in New Zealand Schools May 2019. The report showed ‘most schools were working towards a bullying free environment: 38 percent to a great extent, 45 percent to some extent, and 17 percent to a limited extent.

This surprised me. Shouldn’t every school have high expectations of student conduct and have bullying prevention and response strategies working in their schools to a ‘great extent’? If not, why not?

David’s comments about dealing with bullying, come a week after I attended a meeting of the Bullying Prevention Advisory Group (BPAG), sponsored by the Ministry of Education.  This group was established in 2013 and meets regularly to make decisions on how to reduce and eliminate bullying. It is made up of sector and interest group representatives. All good people with good intentions. 

Since the inception of this group, instances of bullying in schools have increased, not reduced. In other words, over the lifetime of the group, set-up to reduce bullying, the exact opposite has occurred. 

The challenge for the Ministry is to grasp that pointing the finger at schools and saying ‘do better’ isn’t a strategy nor is it an action. To be influential in attacking a complex problem such as bullying, we need decision makers who can see the problem as multifaceted and are prepared to marshal resources and support around the issue. 

We need decision makers to back action. 

Our schools reflect society. The behaviours we deal with at school reflect the challenges experienced by young people growing up. 

Yes, some schools can do better, and we as principals need to own that. However, we need much more from our Ministry than a finger pointing exercise. 

At the recent BPAG meeting I shared 4 action-based strategies to attack the issue of bullying. All would require the Ministry to make a fiscal investment-to match rhetoric with funding. 

1. Research from a young person’s perspective that seeks to better understand the problem of bullying particularly the impact of social media
2. The funding of student counsellors south of Year 9 because when you have the highest youth suicide rate in the developed world and the second highest rate of bullying you need to take drastic and immediate action to cater for youth mental health
3. An immediate increase in primary management staffing to match that of secondary so primary schools have adequate management resourcing to follow through on students with conduct issues 
4. Resolve schooling options for students who are violent or have serious behaviour issues so that these students are not able to hurt and harm those around them 

No more finger pointing please! Tackling bullying is a shared responsibility and we need to commit to action.  

I invite the Ministry of Education and BPAG to join principals to work on agreed solutions which can be appropriately resourced.  

So, David, the next time either of us have an invitation to be interviewed on Breakfast TV, let’s be interviewed together. It would be wonderful to announce to the New Zealand public a raft of practical strategies and resources that we have agreed to deploy that will make a tangible difference to this distressing problem!

Let’s get it done!

School Camps
School camps have been in the news lately. They are a Kiwi icon in many ways and parents, kids, teachers and principals would not want to see the learning opportunities that school camps afford, be taken from our kids.

The thing is, we have to seek financial support from parents to cover the costs of taking kids to school camp.  The operations grant has never covered the costs and still doesn’t.  Largely, parents are happy to support schools by contributing to the costs and have been doing this for as long as we have been running school camps. 

What we have to remember is that when we ask parents to help with camp costs, we are technically asking them for a donation, not an extra-curricular fee.  That has always been the case, because camps are considered part of the curriculum.

It seems ridiculous that the costs for camps are deemed to be donations and that payment is therefore voluntary. This is an issue I raised with Minister Chris Hipkins this week. The law needs some tidying up as schools are now confronted with parents making a legitimate claim that payment for attendance at school camp cannot be enforced yet schools are not funded to provide for the costs of camping.

I am interested to know if your plans for school camp have been affected in any way. Please let me know.

We want the Minister to move decisively to address these concerns as we would not want school camping to be adversely affected.

Ngā manaakitanga

Perry Rush
perry@nzpf.ac.nz