A nationwide NZEI survey last year of primary and intermediate school staff found that more than 50 percent of teachers and more than a quarter of school support staff had experienced aggressive verbal confrontations with students. Some staff had been assaulted. Ministry of Education statistics for last year also show an increase in the number of student suspensions and stand-downs for the primary sector. What can be done to stem the rising tide of disruptive behaviour? Rourou visited Tauranga where Group Special Education is having success with early intervention programmes.
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In Tauranga they love their bridges. The council maintains 17 bridges throughout the city, and Transit New Zealand look after the other 15. Despite former Tauranga MP Winston Peters’ quip that Tauranga didn’t need any more bridges, the people of Tauranga couldn’t resist voting in the National candidate – Simon Bridges.

There’s some serious bridge building going on in special education too. John McGovern, Service Manager, Group Special Education, in Tauranga, says the co-ordination of education and social agencies is the key to dealing with the growing problem of disruptive students in the city. Though Tauranga is known for its retirees (twice the national average), its marinas and McMansions, it also has a growing number of young families attracted by steady work and a pleasant lifestyle. Unfortunately, says John, the social infrastructure has not kept pace with the burgeoning population.

“When kids are referred to us, things are usually going wrong in both school and home, so we try to intervene at every point, with the teacher, the teacher aide, the student and the parents. Where possible, we try to get parents to attend the Incredible Years parent training programme (see box). Sometimes there are issues between the student and extended family so we have to work with grandparents and so on. Sometimes there can be borderline offending so we have to work with the community as well. That’s a lot of work for an educational agency so we try to involve Child Youth and Family, the Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service, the police, Youth Aid and a number of community agencies.”

It’s this “wraparound service”, the bridge building, that offers the best chance of success, says John. But sometimes schools leave it too late to make a referral. “If it’s too late the level of breakdown between the school and the family is fairly high, and so is the breakdown between the student and the teachers. So there’s a lot of repair and rebuilding work required. It just doesn’t seem to work well because attitudes have hardened.”

Early intervention can make all the difference, says John. “If we do a wraparound at primary and intermediate we actually ameliorate the situation so the crises at secondary level are not as great. The research is really clear that it’s much harder to do a turnaround with teenagers and the outcomes are much less effective”.

From 2002 onwards John worked with a paediatrician and a RTLB to set up a Service Co-ordination for Children with Disruptive Development Disorders. The service aims to identify children who may fall through the cracks because their disability or delay is not diagnosed early on. By building up a database of children with DDDs in the area it makes it easier to target resources because we have quality assessment data, says John. “It’s possible to link it in with B4 School Checks and make the use of paediatric time more efficient.”

So how can teachers recognise the signs that a child is not just being naughty but needs help? “When kids get upset the first thing we see is high levels of activity, either physical or verbal but often not directed at anything. You can see they’re tense and anxious but you need to respond effectively so the kid settles. The wrong response at that time can make them more upset.” Often, teachers will leave it too late, says John, and then over-use punishment which increases the likelihood that the behaviour will deteriorate.”

Most teachers are ill prepared by their training to handle disruptive and troubled students. Next year GSE is planning to introduce Incredible Years training for primary teachers in Tauranga. The programme will strengthen teachers’ classroom management and student engagement practices, promote prosocial behaviour in the classroom, help teachers work with parents and promote consistency between home and school. GSE will also be delivering training to teachers and senior management staff in crisis intervention and prevention in 2009.

John believes school suspensions can often be useful as they “give a space to work out robust strategies to deal with a crisis”. However, exclusions leave the student with few options. “In Tauranga, schools often don’t accept students who’ve been excluded and if they’re not accepted they are often marooned in a difficult position with a family that is having difficulty functioning. With their education on hold, they lose access to a lot of positive influences and opportunities and it opens a gap for them to engage in community offending.”

Consistent, effective and ongoing interventions involving multiple agencies are obviously timeconsuming and expensive. A Ministry of Education review estimated the monetary costs of successful interventions increases from $5000 for a five-year old to $60,000 for a 15-year-old. Not cheap - but perhaps not as pricey as the alternative. Four prisons built in the last five years cost $1 billion.
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Changes to education law setting national standards to assess students in primary and intermediate schools will be in place early in Term 1 next year, if the new Prime Minister’s 100-day action plan rolls out according to schedule.

New Education Minister Anne Tolley is also charged with publishing “requirements for primary and intermediate schools to report to parents in plain English about how their child is doing compared to the set National Standards, and compared to other children their age” in her first 100 days in office.
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NZEI will play an important role in advocating for standards that ensure assessment continues to be focused on feeding into student learning, rather than becoming high stakes testing, President Frances Nelson says.

NZEI’s other priorities have not changed with a change in government. Two priorities that are getting immediate attention are fair pay for support staff and National’s proposed 90-day “probationary period” for new employees in worksites under 20 people, Frances says.

“The most urgent issue is to ensure that the “pay jolt” for support staff pledged by Labour before the election is honoured by the new government,” she says. “NZEI members worked hard to get that preelection commitment and we urge members to encourage the new government to support it.”

“Clearly it is not fair for the Government to deal with low pay for cleaners and caretakers while some of their support staff colleagues are on rates as low as $12.69 an hour. Teacher aides, for example, are likely to play an important role in the implementation of National’s “Literacy and Numeracy Crusade”.

Ensuring NZEI members are exempt from the 90-day probationary period is likely to need to be addressed during collective agreement negotiations, with the support staff and kindergarten teachers’ agreement first off the blocks early next year.

Frances says NZEI has welcomed a “voluntary bonding” scheme for graduate teachers willing to work in hard-to-staff communities, as a step towards addressing critical teacher supply issues. The new Government’s decision to invest $500 million in capital works in schools will also be watched with interest, as there has been controversy over the possible use of public-private partnerships (where private developers build and own the school and lease it back to the government).

Prime Minister John Key has also committed to increased funding for private schools in next year’s Budget, and to a line-by-line spending review of the Ministry of Education and other public services.

“Members who work in Group Special Education can be assured we will be monitoring this review very closely,” Frances says. “And while it is always useful to check the best use is being made of public resources, we need a Ministry with strong policy, research, and advocacy functions.”
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Involving parents and the community in creating a local curriculum is a key expectation of the revised New Zealand Curriculum. For many schools, though, more community involvement in the practice of teaching and learning is scary, a venture that seems to reduce the power and influence of trained professionals and may be full of pitfalls.
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One school that has not only embraced the idea but has also created a model of community involvement in the curriculum is Southbridge School, a small rural school in the heart of the Canterbury plains, with a roll of approximately 130 children from Year 0 to Year 6.

“My slant on the curriculum is that I’m picking out all those comments throughout the curriculum that says go out and consult your community,” says Principal Peter Verstappen. “Here’s an opportunity to do it and do it well. I work from the belief that if we’re going to fashion a successful 21st century education system we need to review and rearrange these relationships of power within a child’s educational frame.

_{Right: Peter Verstappen, Principal of Southbridge School: “Teachers were never the fountain of all knowledge. I think we used to pretend we were.”}

“Teachers never were the fountain of all knowledge,” says Peter. “I think we used to pretend we were because it suited us but certainly in the years to come we will be even less so, the world and knowledge systems are not set up any longer for teachers to be the sole input into children’s education so we have to fashion different relationships with our communities and we’ve got to get all those people in a child’s life working together to get the best education for that child.”

The Southbridge School programme of curriculum consultation is entitled “2020Vision”, inspired by the knowledge that the new entrant cohort in 2007 will reach Year 13 in 2020.

But how do you forge useful relationships and partnerships when parents have no training in pedagogy? Peter believes the first step is cutting back on jargon. “We’re a jargon-ridden profession. Using language is all important because language is all about power too. We have to demonstrate to our community that we’re not going to hide behind that wall of eduspeak as we’ve done in the past.”

Southbridge uses a range of forums from Boards of Trustee meetings to strategic planning days to consult with its school community. “We haven’t just stood up and done all the talking, we’ve sat back and listened and tried to enable parents to talk about their own experiences and about their hopes and dreams for education. “They don’t have a grasp of educational theory but they know what they believe. You ask any parent and they will have stories that worked well with them. And they will certainly have a concept of the kind of world and the kind of values and skills that they want their child being fluent in.”

One thing that has worked particularly well for the school is parent focus groups. Groups of parents meet every six weeks to two months and the staff will ask them what their views are on a particular issue, such as information communication technology. “I’ve been really impressed by their willingness to engage, their enthusiasm to go away and do a bit of homework, to look up some websites, to gather some educational resources to come back and inform their own view,” says Peter. “I’m noticing their confidence to discuss curriculum is growing. It’s a small self-selected group but it does represent a voice of our community in curriculum conversations in school and I think as we move further ahead I would like to think that group would be the kernel of a larger group of people who are able to negotiate curriculum at that level.”

Consultation has also involved students and former students. A group of Year 7 and 8 students now at the local college were invited back to give their views on how well the school had prepared them for the transition to high school. “That was quite good and it’s something we intend this year to follow up,” says Peter. “With our own students, it’s probably an area where we recognise we haven’t done enough about yet. We believe that’s a little gap in our process at the moment. The bottom line for any curriculum is that if it’s not engaging the students then you’re failing. Somehow you’ve got to incorporate that student voice into constructing that curriculum.”


_{Above: Southbridge School: studying eels at Lake Ellesmere}

This year Southbridge teachers plan to conduct teacher-parent interviews not in the school but in the students’ homes. “We think that could be a huge affirmation for our students of the value that their teachers place on the connection between school and home,” says Peter.

So, has increased consultation and community and parent involvement in reshaping the curriculum made a difference to teaching and learning in the school? An ongoing study of the initiative is being conducted with researchers Associate Professor Alison Gilmore and Dr Susan Lovett of Canterbury University. “Eight months down the track they’ve built a relationship with the school where they are now part of our process,” says Peter. “It’s a kind of reflective action model of research whereby the researchers are informing our process while our processes are informing their research. They’re becoming partners in it and they are involved in some of our parent forums. They’re involved as interviewers but also as people who can offer a point of view in constructing the curriculum with us. It becomes a really powerful mutual learning relationship.”

“There is very strong staff, parent and community support for the 2020Vision project,” says Alison Gilmore. “One of the goals of our research project,” says Peter, “is to see what effect all that we’re doing is having on student engagement. We’re not asking what effect it’s having on student achievement because we figure that’s too hard to work out. But we might be able to measure what effect it’s having with their engagement with learning. And we can perhaps draw the assumption that if they’re more engaged with their learning their achievement will follow.”

So what advice does he have for other schools that want to create a local curriculum with community involvement? “We have to send strong signals to our community that this is not just a wallpaper exercise,” says Peter. “The fundamental thing is to show them it isn’t once over lightly, a quick questionnaire, get the results back and no one hears any more about it – which is often what happens.”

Peter says it’s important to get the process right and not start off with discussions about, say, key competencies. “I think we need to start engaging in the community first and foremost about what is our vision in our school, what are our values in our school. Get that stuff straight first and leave the curriculum programme until further down the track. At the same time it’s important not to get stuck in the big picture. People get frustrated because they never see how the big picture is actually going to translate into concrete action.”

Peter says closer consultation with the community in creating a local curriculum is going to be a never ending process for the schools of the future. “We’ve got to treat this as a journey that will continue for as long as we can imagine it.”
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Support Staff are strongly backing a new NZEI-led campaign for better pay and conditions. The “Stronger Together for Fair Pay”, campaign, launched at the Support Staff Conference last month, is demanding wage justice for what is one of the lowest paid workforces in the country...
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Support staff are a diverse group of workers numbering more than 20,000 who play pivotal roles in schools and centres.

The “Stronger Together for Fair Pay” campaign aims to not only improve support staff pay rates, but also ensure schools have the additional funding to cover the costs and highlight the issues around underfunding and low pay. It’s a critical campaign which will not only benefit support staff, but schools as well.

Co-incidentally there are signs that the Government may shortly settle the collective agreement for school cleaners and caretakers. It is understood it will raise their minimum rate from 12.00 an hour to $14.62 an hour.


_{Above: The Support Staff Work Programme team Monique Jansonius, Sue Nimmo and Gaye Parlane: support staff are tired of reviews and want wage justice now.}
 
NZEI congratulates the Service and Food Workers Union for their cleaners and caretakers campaign so far, but believes that a government that is committed to addressing low pay should fix the situation for all school workers.

The recent national Support Staff conference provided the perfect opportunity to officially launch the “Stronger Together for Fair Pay” campaign. More than 200 NZEI support staff members attended the three-day conference at Rotorua’s Millennium Hotel. They enjoyed a packed programme of workshops, presentations and discussions, from where the “Stronger Together for Fair Pay” message rang out loud and clear.

NZEI has been lobbying for six years to address some of the issues facing support staff and NZEI National President Frances Nelson told the conference “it’s time for the invisible army of education workers to become a very visible army of support for the campaign”.

NZEI National Secretary Paul Goulter also made a call for action, and outlined the goals of what he described as a political and community-based campaign. Support staff have waited too long and are tired of government promises to address the issues through ongoing reviews and working parties. Members are “reviewed out”, he said.

Local Rotorua MP and Women’s Affairs Minister Steve Chadwick addressed the meeting. She freely admitted that education wasn’t her area, but that she was eager to understand the issues and hear from support staff first hand.

She said that investing in the education workforce was a priority for Labour and pay and employment equity reviews would give the government a fuller picture of support staff salaries and conditions.

“The legacy of low pay is taking a while for us to sort out but we want to work in partnership to find a resolution,” she said. Steve Chadwick hinted that centralised funding for support staff was being looked at and appeared to be sympathetic to members’ concerns that there is no tagged funding for support staff within the School Operations Grant.

In finishing her address, she told the audience that she would return to Wellington much wiser about the situation facing support staff and promised to take a strong message back to the Minister and her Cabinet colleagues.

Steve Chadwick also engaged with the National Party education spokesperson Anne Tolley during a lively political forum chaired by CTU President Helen Kelly. Bay of Plenty Green Party candidate Jon Sadler also took part.

The three politicians were quizzed on a variety of topics from operational grant funding to employment relations. Anne Tolley acknowledged the diversity of support staff and their value to the community. She repeated that National firmly believes there is enough money in the system and there will be no additional operational funding. In terms of funding core support staff roles centrally, rather than through operational funding, she said the party was still looking into that.

In the lead up to the conference, there had already been some campaign groundwork. Members around the country had been flooding the Minister of Finance Michael Cullen’s offices with faxes and emails demanding action from the Government. One Hamilton school sent over 62 letters, while NZEI members at a Napier school went one step further and personally filled Dr Cullen’s home letterbox with letters. A Nelson member went straight to the top, cornering the Prime Minister Helen Clark at a CTU forum recently, giving her a copy of all the support staff issues and asking her to promise to read them.
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