Stuff: Some schools rejecting competition — the rest should too

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In the 1990s, when competition between schools was at its peak, I attended Petone College, which had developed a bad reputation locally. Many parents – Pākehā ones in particular – had panicked, and fled; the school’s roll was sinking, as was morale.

What happened to it in the end? We’ll get to that; but first, I want to talk about a promising path that Christchurch’s state schools have quietly been taking. Following the 2011 earthquake, they had to rebuild on a big scale. And that, Burnside High School principal Phil Holstein told me this week, was a chance to look at “the inequalities, the growing disparities between perceived ‘successful’ schools and others”.

Ever since the 1980s Tomorrow’s Schools reforms, our educational establishments have been set up to compete with each other for pupils, and thus funding. But while some things, like supermarket provision, are improved by competition, schooling is not.

Since the evidence shows low and high-decile schools have equally good teaching, ‘white flight’ reflects less a drive towards quality and more a prejudice against poorer, Māori and Pasifika children. It’s also immensely wasteful: driving kids across town congests roads and supercharges emissions.

In 2017, Christchurch children travelled 171,000 kilometres a day getting to school, 71,000 more than if they’d attended the nearest establishment.

Competition can also result in school closures, wasting precious equipment and buildings and damaging the local community. Worst of all, it hinders knowledge-sharing: well-regarded schools have no incentive to share insights with struggling ones, who remain competitors. No wonder successful school systems like Finland’s emphasise collaboration, not competition.

Neil Wilkinson, a former president of Christchurch’s secondary principals’ association, says even pre-earthquake there were “concerns about the number of out-of-zone enrolments some schools were taking, and the impact of some schools getting larger and others shrinking”.

After a long process, 13 of the city’s coeducational state schools have signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU), committing to keep their rolls below mutually agreed levels. Some rolls will actually shrink: Cashmere’s from 2022 in 2018 to 1700, and Burnside’s from 2342 to 2100. (Separately, the city’s enrolment zones have been redrawn.)

Since fewer pupils means less funding, this is a remarkable commitment. How did schools overcome self-interest? Ethics, essentially. “We really believed it was for the good of our city,” says Holstein, who has succeeded Wilkinson as principals’ association president. “There was just a moral purpose, if you like, [a sense] that it was time to address it.”

As a 2016 KPMG report showed, some principals maintained hardline free-market views, arguing other schools were “excess market capacity” that should be closed. Fortunately they were outnumbered.

The process involved “many difficult conversations”, Wilkinson says. But it helped that the Ministry of Education, which was funding the post-earthquake rebuild, made it clear “they weren’t going to put buildings on your site if you were increasing your out-of-zone enrolments”.

Connections were also forged: other principals “came to understand, and hear, the stories of schools that were losing students” – not because they were educationally weak, but because an unfair reputation had become entrenched. Big-time raiders – like Burnside, whose roll was 40 per cent out-of-zone – acknowledged their impact on others.

The MOU doesn’t eliminate competition and poaching entirely. But, Holstein says, “We are looking after the network now.” Even the state schools that haven’t signed the MOU – all four single-sex ones, and one coeducational – are abiding by its principles, he says.

Of course the private schools, like Christ’s College, will do as they please. And the MOU process is a slow one: Burnside, for instance, will miss its deadline for reducing its roll, which it is doing incrementally by trimming its Year 9 intake.

Nonetheless, Holstein says, city-wide out-of-zone enrolments have already fallen. This year Burnside’s only such enrolments were for special-programme students and siblings of current pupils: “That’s a significant change.”

Wilkinson says collegiality has soared, because principals “aren’t looking at the principal next door and saying, ‘you’ll be flogging my students next year.’” The network is used more efficiently: fewer classrooms sit empty. And limiting parental flight “gives schools the chance to prove how good they are”.

Parents also have an incentive to “get in there and be part of the solution”. The pressure for improvement is maintained by their presence, not their absence.

The MOU is voluntary: there are no penalties for schools that break it. But it’s still something that other cities’ schools should be encouraged to copy – or face having it mandated by the ministry if they can’t agree.

This would help reform a system marred by inappropriate competition. And it’s all the more important to safeguard the future since we can’t undo the damage of the past. Petone College, you see, never pulled out of its white-flight death-spiral: it closed just after the end of my seventh-form year.