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Image: Getty Images

SocietyApril 23, 2021

Auckland’s new school zones: ‘We feel like we’re being kicked out of our community’

Image: Getty Images
Image: Getty Images

Catherine Woulfe’s son’s school is nothing fancy. But it’s theirs. Auckland’s new zoning rules will mean her daughter, when she turns five, will have to go to a different one – and that’s heartbreaking.

I just saw a map that puts us 100 metres out of zone for the primary school my son’s been at for two years. It’s an absolutely stock-standard state school. Diverse, with a roll of about 460. Decile four back when we still talked about deciles. Nothing wrong with it, nothing fancy either. But this is our school. It’s right next to kindy and daycare. It’s the school my son loves, the school my daughter toddles through cooing “skoo”, the school we assumed she would be part of, in a few years. But now we’re all but certain: she won’t. 

Right now this school is not zoned. It takes all comers. But it is already overflowing and that’s without counting the huge development going in just down the road. 

When the zoning kicks in later this year the first spots will go to families who live inside the magic lines on the map. Those kids get first dibs – even over siblings of current students. If the school doesn’t fill up then siblings might squeak in through a ballot system. But if the school does fill up – as we expect it to – then sorry, that’s it. 

So the map I saw this morning is a map that says to our little girl: no. You can not come here. Your brother can stay, if he likes, but not you. And what that feels like is a message to the whole family: you are not welcome. 

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When you join a school you join a community. Or you follow one. We chose this school because Ben’s little gang of mates from kindy were headed there. We wanted to stick with their families, too – these are the parents we’ve been with since our kids were tiny, through Playcentre sessions and kindy drop-offs and vomiting bugs and first steps. These women have rubbed my back as I miscarried. They’ve held my sobbing boy. We’re well past the small talk, and thank god.

So we chose this school. And it’s nothing fancy, but it has kind receptionists, the sort who make you feel totally fine about fucking up all the paperwork or not knowing you were meant to buy a bookbag. It’s not fancy, but one day I stumbled into the office with my screaming new baby and they all but tucked me in for a nap; I remember breastfeeding on the couch and looking at the steamed-up windows and feeling so happy we’d found a good place for my boy. It’s not fancy, but I can’t describe what it felt like when Ben’s teachers dressed up and danced like twits to ‘Don’t Worry Be Happy’, and sent the video out on the hardest, scariest day of lockdown. 

When we joined this school we joined a community, and although what’s happening is not the school’s fault, it is a very primal thing to be kicked out of it. 

I am emotional. I am entertaining wild ideas. Maybe we sell the home we’ve been in for 10 years, the place with the huge willow and my cat’s ashes and my boy’s whenua, and buy in-zone, ie across the road? Maybe we pull a Grammar and pretend the kids now live in-zone with their granny? Maybe we switch Ben into the perfectly good school we’re about to be zoned for? But I can’t see how pulling a six-year-old away from his friends is any kind of solution. Especially after the disruption they all went through last year. 

I can’t stop thinking about how hard it was for us to have Leo, how the age gap of nearly five years was always going to make it harder for our kids to be friends, but being at different schools … we knew that zoning was coming, but naively we assumed siblings would get automatic access. We only just realised that in a city under pressure that’s not how it works. We feel blindsided. How did we end up with a school system, with a social infrastructure, that splits up siblings when they’re five and nine? 

As the hurt wears off I will start to be properly pissed off about the pragmatics. Two logins for the clumsy app that schools use to keep in touch. Two sets of teacher-only days to work around; two sets of assemblies and prize-givings, school plays and dances, dress-up days to remember, fun runs, two school galas (gaaaah). Two sets of school drop-off and pick-up. 

Our house is smack in the middle of the two schools. Each one is about a 15-minute walk up a hill. There’s no way you’d walk that loop with two kids in tow. This is a small thing, but also not: I really, really wanted to be able to walk my kids to school each day. They’re knackered by the afternoon. That morning walk is a chance to hang out when everyone’s at their sweetest. For them to hang out together. 

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The more I think about it the more I’m convinced that what’s about to happen across Auckland (while well overdue, logistically) is a kind of societal carnage. New zones are getting dropped on schools – on families – all over the place. Communities are about to be carved up and that will blow back on schools, which can only work well when their whānau feel engaged, as well as on families. Because these changes simply have to happen consultation is likely to be piecemeal, a hollering into the wind. Many families, like us, won’t have had to deal with zoning until now: this is not simply a matter of tweaking lines on a map, it’s borders thumping down where there were none before. 

So many parents will be left running the what-if maths: will my rent go up? How do I stretch the petrol budget? What if my landlord kicks me out so his kids can get in-zone? How do I possibly manage two full sets of uniform? 

More visible will be the never-ending story about what zoning is doing to house prices. Hottest new streets, revealed. Zoning shock: the house that lost $100,000 overnight. I want to be clear that my reaction to what’s happening in our neighbourhood has nothing to do with what’s happening to the value of our home. If you bought a house 10 years ago in Auckland you do not get to fret about property prices. 

We deliberately bought in an area with no zoning because we were repulsed by the whole scramble, the gross rich-get-richness of it all. So as a crash course, I’ve been reading the guidelines that the secretary for education produced for all the schools trying to get to grips with zoning. The document was only released in December but it reads like a story about somewhere else, a long time ago. What it taught me is that zones and the rules around them are set up for people with the immense privilege of staying put. It’s not a system for those in most need of a welcoming community: those who’ve been buffeted by Covid, by Auckland’s cataclysmically hot property market, by trying to find – and then hang on to – a decent rental, or a job. It’s not set up for fluid families, where children are sent to whoever’s best equipped at the time, or for broken families, unless you’re the kind who break in organised, documented fashion. It’s not set up for families forced to cram into homes with other families, or for those who don’t have the resources to navigate what’s now going to be an acutely stressful enrolment process. 

Seriously, brace for things to get invasive. “Schools have found documents such as power bills, bank statements, rates demands, leases or tenancy agreements and statutory declarations to be useful in the past,” the new guidelines say. “Experience has shown, however, that not even these documents will necessarily provide evidence of ‘genuineness’.”

Further tips for schools: check whether an in-zone house looks “suitable” for a family to really be living in. If a child is living with their grandmother in-zone, find out whether there are “special family circumstances” behind the arrangement – or do they just want into your school? Get in touch with landlords to find out more about their tenants’ circumstances. Say a student has just moved into the zone to live with his dad: check the place out, if it’s a one-bedroom flat, definitely raise an eyebrow. Keep a list of all the families you have “suspicions” about, even if you can’t prove they’re lying. Yet.

So much prying, so much grey, so many judgements that will come down to the character of the poor sod each school puts in charge of gatekeeping. And as I read through all of it, this whole bleak document, I keep picturing walking down our drive with my kids, and waving my son off on his trip to school, and turning to head the other way with my daughter.

Keep going!
Photo: Getty Images
Photo: Getty Images

SocietyApril 23, 2021

We’ve wasted time and money in health for years. Now let’s get on with it

Photo: Getty Images
Photo: Getty Images

Those of us who govern are acutely aware of the problems inherent in the requirement to mind our own patch, not everybody else’s, writes Auckland DHB chair Pat Snedden.

This week’s health announcements signalled a big day in a number of ways. Health minister Andrew Little took time in a thoroughly principled fashion to describe how a country our size has shortchanged ourselves and shortchanged Māori in the provision of health care. His commentary was devoid of usual political rhetoric. He took the time to say in plain language that what we have at the moment simply isn’t working well enough for most of the population. 

In particular, he named the elephant in the room. For decades, Māori citizens have got the short end of the stick. The care provided has not been good enough. No excuses, no literary flannel. He simply named it and then explained what this government intended to do to fix this citizen deficit. His analysis was brave but unsentimental. 

He was clear that we have failed the citizen test of equal access to care for Māori and we are not going to continue with policy and practice that will maintain the status quo. Nor are we going to try yet another formula to fix it. Rather we are to enfranchise Māori with the resource and the operating authority to address their own needs and reach into the wider system to moderate the practices of their tāngata Tiriti partners. 

This is truly transformational in intent. Never have I been in a room where the Māori audience was so in harmony with such a change. I think this has struck a chord of optimism similar to the setting up of the Waitangi Tribunal in 1984. At last the health system has recognised that tāngata whenua are best placed to decide what is right for tāngata whenua and what’s more they are capable of telling the rest of us as Tiriti partners what they want. This shift is monumental. 

This is but one of the seismic changes. The initial analysis on the need for system change, ably managed by Heather Simpson over two years and across the whole of the system, told us that care is uneven throughout the country. Postcode health is not an acceptable position to be in where the closer you are to the main centres, the better your chances lie in living longer assisted by higher quality care. This cannot be right and this Minister is determined to change this on behalf of us all.

Where Heather Simpson’s work parted company with the final result is around the new emphasis of tino rangatiratanga in Māori care. Māori being in charge and fully funded for their own health delivery did not find favour initially. But the final result is emphatically in favour of Māori for Māori care and for Māori to influence more directly and more decisively the whole of the health system delivery. This has a genuine chance of providing something approaching equal health outcomes for all New Zealanders. There is now a huge expectation to get on with this. 

We have obviously learnt from the Covid pandemic that the power of a public health system that can work together seamlessly across the nation is better than a series of outposts trying to do their best in the local areas. We also have learnt that public policy matters when it comes to the social determinants of health. It counts if we are well fed, live in warm and dry housing and have access to social services where and when we need them. Hence a public health agency in the Ministry of Health for policy, strategy and intelligence with an expert advisory committee about what counts for the health of the population. In addition, a single public health service managed by Health NZ as the operational arm to manage threats to the population such as Covid, wherever they occur in the country. 

We have wasted time and money in our current system duplicating technology, having multiple systems that don’t interface each other well, creating bespoke solutions to challenges where a centralised mandate would do better for all of us. Workforce planning is a clear example. It will now be a centrally managed process. This will also apply to capital expenditure that will at last be rationed in an effective, whole-of-country manner. 

Those of us who currently govern have seen this problem but our historical requirement is to mind our own patch, not everybody else’s. All this changes as DHBs disappear and four regions take on the job of organising the care equitably. This is much less a centralised model being proposed than it is a distributed model. It will mean simplifying organisations and consolidating roles under common leadership, but that will involve greater investment and more people – not fewer. What gets done centrally, regionally and locally has yet to be described in comprehensive detail but the intentions are now clear. There are some decisions we no longer need to make 20 times. 

We now need to give this change the chance to fulfil its promise. 

But wait there's more!