Paying down the equity debt in our schools

Creating and maintaining the conditions for learning for tamariki burdened by compounding hardship is a relentless and all-consuming challenge for school leaders. In Papakura, that burden is lightened by community partners who share a fierce commitment to educational equity.

This is an edited excerpt from Hardship and Hope: Stories of Resistance in the Fight Against Poverty in Aotearoa, by Rebecca Macfie (Bridget Williams Books 2025).

 

South Auckland woman Sarah Corson came into the orbit of Papakura’s primary and intermediate principals while she was carrying out research for a philanthropic foundation. She came away thinking: “Wow, how do these schools function?”

She and long-time Papakura school social worker Louise Belcher decided to set up a small NGO called Painga Project in 2018, not yet knowing how they would help.

“I realised that if we were going to do something here we [had] to have really deep relationships with the schools, and it [had] to be based on trust,” says Corson.

They started by meeting every principal and asking a simple question: “What do you need?”

The universal answer was transport. “They couldn’t get their kids beyond their school gate,” remembers Corson. One school was paying $3,000 to bus its students to the pool a kilometre down the road for their mandatory swimming lessons. The rivers of cash that flow into school coffers in rich communities — “donations” of $700-plus per child, prompt payment of invoices for class trips and camps, profits from lavishly sponsored school fairs and gala dinners — are not available here.

Corson and Belcher sought philanthropic donors, resulting in two vans for the schools’ use. Volunteers from the community were recruited as drivers.

Some schools said they needed togs. Many kids didn’t own any, and so they were sitting at the side of the pool, unable to participate in swimming lessons. “I’d never pulled my St Cuth’s card,” says Corson, who grew up in a prominent Gisborne agribusiness family and had been a boarder at Auckland’s elite St Cuthbert’s College. But she did so now. “I contacted them and said, ‘Can you do a tog drive?’” Three hundred pairs of togs and towels, handed on from some of New Zealand’s most privileged children, materialised.

The schools were identifying some of the most obvious cracks in their basic infrastructure, and Painga was able to fill them. It was easy for Corson, a natural organiser with deep and diverse connections. She was aware of her own privilege, and she and Belcher understood that communities like Papakura were accustomed to people turning up with grand solutions and delusions of superiority and then disappearing. They knew trust would be hard won and easily lost.

Painga developed the philosophy of treading lightly, working in the background to help principals get what they needed without sucking up scarce time and energy with unproductive meetings, demands for information and photo opportunities.

One day, Bec KauKau, the then-principal of Papakura Intermediate, phoned. “Our students are hungry,” she said.

Corson had seen the charitable food offerings that some schools had signed up for. “When you get a sandwich and it’s the back of a crust buttered and reversed, with a bit of dried carrot and grated cheese that’s fallen out because there’s not enough to glue it together — all that does is tell that child they are poor and they aren’t worth it.”

She was confident Painga could do better. It set up a breakfast club, and went into daily produc­tion of fresh lunch rolls stuffed with salad and fillings, for both Papakura Intermediate and nearby Kererū Park primary school. “We funded it ourselves and used volunteers to make the lunches. We got tomatoes and lettuces donated,” says Corson. “We just made it happen because we needed to.”

When the government’s school lunch programme Ka Ora, Ka Ako was rolled out in 2020, Painga became an internal supplier within Papakura Intermediate. Now adequately funded for this work, Painga was able to start meeting other school and student needs.

Deep fissures

It started to become clear that some of those needs were hiding in plain sight.

Among Painga’s funders was businesswoman Sally Synnott, a trustee of the New Zealand Cochlear Implant Foundation and a former board member of The Hearing House, an Auckland charity providing support for the Northern Cochlear Implant Programme. Synnott was part of a small group visiting Papakura schools one day when she noticed students using sign language at Redhill School, a full primary serving a neighbourhood characterised by severe deprivation.

The school had a policy of teaching and using sign language to ensure one profoundly deaf student was able to participate, as well as to provide an alternative form of communication for tamariki burdened by trauma and fear. But there were also about a dozen tamariki whose behaviour indicated they might be hard of hearing — cocking their heads to one side, getting up very close to the teacher — but who had had no diagnosis, treatment or additional learning support.

Synnott’s questions sparked conversations within Painga and with local principals. Corson did a ring-around and found that, of 3,000-odd Papakura school children, there wasn’t one using a hearing aid.

Theoretically, tamariki who were hard of hearing would be picked up by the universal hearing screening for newborns and the B4 School Check, the health and development check for all New Zealand four-year-olds.

Coincidentally, at around the time these conversa­tions were happening in Papakura, a powerful study revealing significant equity gaps in the coverage of the B4 School Check was published in the journal BMJ Open. Researchers analysed over 250,000 records against a range of socio-economic determinants and found that the checks were far from “universal”. Those children most likely to benefit from early diagnosis and intervention were the least likely to be getting them. The more deprived the household, the less likely the child to have been screened.

Painga had stumbled upon yet another deep fissure in New Zealand’s infrastructure of care for children. But this issue was far more complex to address than transport, togs and kai. It would require medical expertise, technical equipment, training, consenting protocols, and a pathway to treatment — not to mention carefully building trust with schools and whānau.

Synnott called on the experience of Claire Green, chief executive of the Hearing House, who pulled in Holly Teagle, associate professor of audiology at the University of Auckland and Hearing House clinical director. The evidence that there were children who had got as far as school with undiagnosed hearing issues left Teagle incredulous. “Right here in Auckland, just under our noses — how can that be?” she remembers thinking.

By then, Covid-19 had arrived. Corson and Hearing House professionals spent much of the Auckland lockdown of August 2020 on Zoom developing a plan. By the time that lockdown ended, they were ready to move towards a school-based screening pilot.

It was decided that, if Painga was going to screen for hearing, it should do vision screening too. The university’s audiology experts linked Painga to the univer­sity’s optometry experts. Equipment was borrowed and volunteers trained to screen children using flip charts and a handheld ocular camera that gave an instant measure of whether a further eye examination was needed.

Kataraina Nock (Ngāti Maniapoto, Ngāti Mutunga), the principal of Papakura’s Edmund Hillary School, agreed to host the pilot. Hearing House staff and Painga volunteers worked out of Nock’s office, in the library — wherever space could be found. Over 170 tamaraki were screened.

The results were startling. Fourteen per cent had not had the B4 School Check, 18 per cent failed the hearing check, and 30 per cent failed the vision test.

For some who failed the hearing test, the problem was temporary — ear infections that would clear with treatment, excessive wax build-up or foreign objects in the ear. But 14 needed referrals to ear, nose and throat specialists at the Manukau SuperClinic. Painga managed to get eight of them there — some children had left the school, and for some, Painga was unable to get consent from parents or guardians. Of those eight, one needed a hearing aid, one needed grommets for glue ear, one needed both grommets and surgery to remove enlarged adenoids, two were discharged and the remainder were still waiting to be seen 12 months after the pilot screening.

Yawning gaps

Within 18 months of the pilot at Edmund Hillary, Painga had its own testing equipment worth around $55,000: an otoscope (which illuminates the ear canal to see blockages or infection), two tympanometers to test the ear drum and middle ear function, vision-testing flip charts, and an eye-screening camera. Painga’s two part- time employees and a core team of volunteers were trained to use it. Corson tapped donors to pay for it.

By mid-2024, Painga’s screening programme was being rolled out at schools in the most severely deprived neighbourhoods of Papakura — Redhill, Papakura Intermediate, Kelvin Road, Kererū Park, and Cosgrove.

Results varied from school to school, but between 18 per cent and 66 per cent of tamariki that Painga saw failed the hearing screen. While many improved with wax suction or other low-level intervention, 9 per cent needed to be referred to an audiologist. Between 22 per cent and 35 per cent failed the vision test, including students who by then had been at school for seven or eight years without their needs being diagnosed.

But screening alone achieves nothing. Painga needed to ensure a clear pathway from screening to treatment. That meant gaining trust and consent from whānau for Painga to transport children, where necessary, to appointments, and forming strong collaborative relationships with health professionals.

From May 2024, Painga was able to refer children directly to the Manukau SuperClinic’s audiology team when they failed the hearing screen. For those who failed the vision test, further assessment and prescriptions were organised through Auckland University’s Vision Bus, or, if the bus wasn’t scheduled to visit Papakura, Painga collected them from school and took them to a local optometrist. If the government’s Enable subsidy of $287.50 didn’t cover the cost of glasses, Painga would top it up. At one primary school, 57 children (14 per cent of those screened) needed, and got, glasses.

Painga “are reaching where others are unable to reach,” says Amber King-Savage (Ngāti Moerewa, Ngāpuhi), who was appointed principal of Papakura Intermediate in 2024 after several years as deputy principal.

“They are all about removing barriers, and kids actually getting what they need to be able to access learning . . . And when they can access learning and engage, they start to believe they are readers, writers, mathematicians. We spend a lot of time building up our kids. Something as simple as glasses — I think it’s not the sole contributor, but it does contribute to a learner being able to access learning.

“[Learning] is something that they have to feel they are worthy of. I say this to kids: ‘It is not your fault that you have been underserved for all of these years that you have been in education.’ Especially those kids who find learning hard, for whatever reason. There is a lot of work that has to be done for kids to truly see that they have potential, or that they can do these things. It’s not everybody, but for a good chunk we have to constantly build them, from the inside out.”

Love first, then learning

Half a kilometre from Papakura Intermediate, Kataraina Nock is in her office at Edmund Hillary School. She stops mid-sentence and looks towards her office door. “Do you need a hug?”

It’s May 2024, and she has been talking to me about the multiple barriers to school attendance for tamariki in Papakura — insecure housing, high transiency, poor physical and mental health, wet weather, parents who put a low value on education because of their own bad experiences.

But a boy has appeared at her door, and her attention has swung to his needs. It’s lunchtime; something has upset him, and he has come to “Raina” for reassurance. He rests in her embrace. She checks him over, and he heads back out to play.

“This [school] needs to be a safe haven for everyone,” she says. “If children know that they are loved and protected, there’s food in their puku and their health needs are covered, then they can learn.”

Establishing and maintaining those prerequisites requires steadfast and strategic leadership. Nock has been principal at Edmund Hillary School for 18 years. She was sent in by the Ministry of Education in 2007 for a 10-week stint to turn the place around. It had churned through 18 principals in 25 years, and the Education Review Office (ERO) had audited it 10 times in 16 years.

A veteran of schools in Māngere, Ōtara and South London, Nock was shocked by the level of deprivation and “gross underachievement” she found. Her temporary role became permanent, and she was soon leading significant improvements. In subsequent audits, ERO remarked on the rapid lift in teaching quality and rising student achievement. Nock had turned the school from a place of threat and violence to one of “engaged, content and happy” tamariki.

Creating a culture of love, safety, and learning meant addressing student needs on multiple fronts, not least of which was implementing a school curriculum that was culturally appropriate for a student population that was 65 per cent Māori and 26 per cent Pasifika.

Food was also critical. The school brought in a volunteer-run breakfast club and developed a large mahinga kai. As well as producing food to supplement student diets, the garden became a place of learning, manaaki and calm.

Nock can spot a hungry child across a crowded play­ground. “I can see it in their eyes. I say, ‘Take a little bit of time. Tell me, have you had brekkie? Are you hungry? Come on, let’s go.’ And after they have eaten, they say, ‘I feel good now, Raina. Can I go to class?’ It reduces the level of anxiety and tension and conflict . . . I run a real tight ship here. The kids know the rules, and there is really only one rule — no harm.”

She adopted the Quick60 literacy programme, in which teachers work with small groups of students to bring them up to their year level in reading. And Edmund Hillary was an early adopter of the Mutukaroa programme, developed by educator Barbara Ala‘alatoa at Sylvia Park School in Auckland, which builds a strong school–home partnership focused on year 1 and 2 students.

“Whānau learn about where their children are heading in terms of achievement, and they are given the resources they need to help their children — pens, paper and resource kits developed by teachers,” explains Nock. “Never in all my years have I met a parent who doesn’t want to do their best. The fact of the matter is they often don’t know what that looks like, and they don’t know how to achieve that — but it’s what they want.”

But even the most skilled school leader is constrained by the ongoing failure of the state to address the deep inequity in our education system. New Zealand ranks 33rd out of 38 developed countries for its overall equality in education.

Until recently, only 2.6 per cent of total school resourcing was tagged as equity funding. With the introduction of a new Equity Index in 2023 came a funding boost, bringing that proportion to 3.8 per cent. It was an improvement, but still well short of the OECD average of 6 per cent, and a far cry from the 10 per cent recommended by the 2019 Tomorrow’s Schools Independent Taskforce.

As the report of that government-appointed taskforce noted, 30 years of accumulated evidence points to a “legacy of system failure to invest the necessary resources in achieving equity and excellence for all learners/ākonga”. As a result, New Zealand faces an “education debt that we must commit to repay . . . we need to consider the ‘debt mountain’ that has been amassed over generations at the expense of significant groups of learners/ākonga, and start to ‘pay down’ what is owed.”

In the absence of adequate state investment in reducing that debt mountain, Nock has forged partner­ships — like the leaders of Papakura Intermediate — with those who can help lift the burden of poverty and unlock the talent of Papakura’s tamariki and whānau.

Painga is one such partner. Another is Kootuitui ki Papakura, a grassroots initiative that works to address education, health and housing needs.

“Kootuitui” means to weave and connect. Launched in 2015, the initiative was a recognition that for children to do well at school, they needed to be well.

Increasing numbers of children in the area were being admitted to hospital with skin and respiratory infections and rheumatic fever. Cold, damp, crowded housing was a key contributor. Acute rheumatic fever can develop from untreated group A streptococcal pharyngitis (strep throat) and skin infections and can progress to rheumatic heart disease, potentially causing cardiac failure, stroke and early death.

Rates of acute rheumatic fever and rheumatic heart disease in Aotearoa New Zealand are among the highest in developed countries around the world and are almost entirely seen in Pasifika and Māori populations.

Kootuitui was initially funded by the charitable Middlemore Foundation. Nurses and whānau support workers were onsite daily in the five primary schools that joined the initiative, and were also able to make home visits. Regular throat checks to detect strep infections and early identification and treatment of skin infections were priorities. A 2019 evaluation of the programme reported a dramatic reduction in rheumatic fever diagnoses in the Kootuitui schools.

In 2021, the Counties Manukau District Health Board (now Health New  Zealand) took over the funding for nurses in the four poorest Kootuitui primary schools. Kootuitui continues to fund a youth worker, nurse practitioner and health consumables at Papakura High School.

As well as the school nursing initiative, Kootuitui became the Papakura partner for an innovative digital learning initiative, Manaiakalani, developed by educators at Pt England School in Glenn Innes. Manaiakalani had been putting Chromebooks into the hands of students since 2010 at a cost of $3 a week, as well as providing professional development and support to teachers.

A third strand of Kootuitui’s work emerged from a co-design process led by Papakura woman Angie Tangaere. Sixteen whānau were brought together to develop ideas that reflected what was most important for families in the area. They settled on a project to create warm, dry, healthy homes — a massive challenge in a neighbourhood with desperately poor housing conditions — following a three-step approach that included whānau-led hui, home assessments, and a suite of home interventions.

The focus was on healthy homes, but it was also about empowering whānau and building confi­dence. All adults involved were parents at schools in the Kootuitui cluster, and many were disengaged from the community.

As the people worked together as volunteers, new friendships were forged and skills built. Some ended up getting jobs and joining their school board of trustees, and one became a justice of the peace. Eight were trained to assess and remediate the cold, damp, mouldy homes that were making whānau and tamariki sick.

Led by Jan Piahana (Ngātiwai, Ngāti Rehua ki Aotea, Ngāti Maru, Ngāti Porou), the warm, dry homes team holds whānau hui twice a month in Papakura church halls, schools and marae, sharing knowledge on the importance of ventilation, efficient heating and insulation. Whānau can then choose to have their houses assessed and then treated.

This usually involves new curtains and draft stoppers and the application of bubble wrap to windows as a cheap but effective form of double glazing. Where necessary, Piahana’s team installs insulation and provides low-wattage heaters, and almost all households get new duvets. There’s also a discretionary fund to pay for essential items like washing machines and beds.

The average cost is about $2,000. Funding comes from Kootuitui, which is in turn funded by philanthropic donors.

The team gathers information from whānau about sickness in the household before the improvements, which provides an insight into the appalling health burden of bad housing. Over 70 per cent of households the team visits have had at least one person ill with asthma or breathing difficulties; 52 per cent with strep throat; 46 per cent with skin allergies or eczema (which can be caused or aggravated by mould); and 5 per cent with pneumonia, flu or bronchitis.

Piahana says her team see terrible conditions. It’s common to find dangerously cold temperatures of 12 or 13 degrees inside the home, and sometimes as low as 10 degrees, heightening the risk of respiratory infection and asthma and causing cardiovascular stress. The World Health Organisation recommends a minimum indoor temperature of 18 degrees, and 20 degrees in households that include children or elderly. Many whānau are aware their homes are making them sick, but won’t raise issues with their landlord for fear of being evicted or having their rent hiked.

After each intervention, whānau are left with a device to measure indoor humidity and temperature and asked to record the data. On average, humidity before treatment is a dangerous 78 per cent, falling after treatment to 54 per cent (which is within the healthy range of 40–70 per cent). The temperature before treatment averages 15 degrees, lifting to 19.9 degrees afterwards.

Around 60 per cent of households are also burdened by large electricity debts — in some cases as high as $1,400. The team works with whānau and power companies to broker debt write-offs or restructuring.

These days, Piahana’s warm, dry homes team are paid employees recruited from the community, rather than volunteers, and they are also able to undertake minor repairs. And Kootuitui has added a fourth strand of work, buying a local budgeting service and securing five years of funding from the Ministry of Social Development to run it.

For Kataraina Nock, all of this is vital support, but it is not enough to pay down that enormous equity debt. The need in Papakura continues to rise. Housing stress remains acute. The cost-of-living crisis is forcing more whānau to rely on food parcels. Across South Auckland, the incidence of rheumatic fever has spiked after several years of improving data. Ka Ora, Ka Ako, the ground-breaking school lunch programme that delivered profound benefits to the health, wellbeing and academic achievement of students in the poorest 25 per cent of schools around the country, has been undermined by the coalition government’s decision to slash funding.

Solidarity, reciprocity, empowerment

Late in August 2024, I prevailed on Amber King-Savage for another chunk of her scarce time. Within 12 hours, she would be on a plane to the United Kingdom with the principal of Papakura High School to interview candidates for teaching roles at their schools.

The staff‍ing shortage had become so desperate that schools were spending tens of thousands of dollars on recruitment agents, to little avail; the Ministry of Education was seemingly unable to deal with the crisis. King-Savage and her colleague had opted for a direct mission to recruit teachers with the skill and commitment the tamariki and rangatahi of Papakura deserve.

It was an extraordinary step to have to take, and yet another illustration of the equity debt owed to these young people. And yet, as King-Savage wrote in her master’s thesis on the professional and personal journeys of four South Auckland principals, to be an educational leader here is an act of service to the community. It is also “deeply personal . . . It is a privilege; it is a calling, and it is a choice.”

Every day is an act of solidarity with the tamariki and rangatahi who deserve an education — who deserve to have their health needs met, to be nourished with good food, to be respected and heard.

It’s a struggle that is made easier with partners who are equally committed to the fight for equity.

“When I think about the needs that we have in our school, the learner support needs we have, and the sorts of support we are trying to wrap around our kids, we encounter so many barriers,” King-Savage says.

“For our highest-needs kids, it can be anywhere from three to four terms to two years of trying to get that support. So having an organisation like Painga as a partner — they ultimately help remove those barriers, and their involvement creates a sense of urgency around what our kids need.”

 

Rebecca Macfie is the 2024 JD Stout Research Fellow at the Stout Research Centre for New Zealand Studies, Victoria University of Wellington Te Herenga Waka. She has been a journalist since 1988, writing for publications including National Business Review, the New Zealand Herald, North & South, Safeguard and Unlimited. She was a senior staff writer at the New Zealand Listener from 2007 until 2018. She is the author of Tragedy at Pike River Mine: How and why 29 men died (Awa Press, 2013), and Helen Kelly: Her Life (Awa Press, 2021).

This is an edited excerpt from Rebecca’s latest book, Hardship & Hope: Stories of resistance in the fight against poverty in Aotearoa, published by Bridget Williams Books.