Carpentry tutor Trent Bray (left) and Salla Delport, Hastings Boys' High School Building Academy co-ordinator, are proud of the work their students have put into their social housing build. Photo / Warren Buckland
Carpentry tutor Trent Bray (left) and Salla Delport, Hastings Boys' High School Building Academy co-ordinator, are proud of the work their students have put into their social housing build. Photo / Warren Buckland
Three years, five houses and almost 50 students through the programme, Hastings Boys' High School Building Academy has taken off quickly, giving young men a boost in their trades career while building houses for those in need through Kāinga Ora.
As the third year wraps up, HBHS Building Academy’s head of department, Salla Delport, is proud of how far the programme has come and how it’s helped young men going to the workforce straight after school.
“It is a fantastic pathway into the building and construction industry,” Delport said.
HBHS is one of a handful of schools in the country with this type of programme, a fulltime course aimed at Year 13 students who want to transition into the building and construction industry.
“It is a great tool to get your hands dirty and learn the tricks of the trade and ... can almost be seen as a semi-pre-trade course, the boys being able to build transportable houses at school this year.
“We built two two-bedrooms as a fantastic gateway to gaining the necessary skills to get a foot in the door in a building and construction job after school,” Delport said.
Hastings Boys' High Building Academy's houses being moved to a storage yard before going to permanent homes.
Through the academy, the boys do everything from subflooring to the trim, windows, skirting and anything else that comes with building a house.
During the year, the students also go out on work experience with local companies, most of which then offer the students employment after they finish the Building Academy programme, with some boys getting apprenticeships immediately.
Other companies choose to employ the boys on trial or as labourers, eventually leading to full apprenticeships.
The head of department (HOD) believes the programme has had a “fantastic strike rate” in terms of employment; last year, of the 17 boys, by November-December, 14 were employed with the remaining three waiting only for driver licences to come through.
“Of the 14 boys this year, 11 have secured employment, there’s a few boys still floating around, but they will get work, hopefully, and that’s even with a downturn in the economy as at the moment,” Delport said.
“We are hoping that it will pick up again, but everything has slowed down in the building and construction industry, but we are positive that it will pick up for those few remaining boys,” he said.
The Building Academy students could not have asked for a better start to get their foot in the door; they have a step up when it comes to employers choosing someone straight out of high school compared with someone who has completed the Building Academy programme.
Hastings Boys' High School Building Academy is finishing up the last of this year's buildings and is excited for the next adventures in the new year.
“Our boys always get picked first because they have practical skills, they know what they’re doing, they can project manage themselves, they can reflect, they can think, they can read a plan, they are accountable, reliable and will turn up to work,” the HOD said.
Fully self-funded, Hastings Boys High School Building Academy has built five houses over the past three years that were then on-sold to local social housing projects.
While the houses do get sold, Delport explained the academy is a zero-profit scheme because it is not a registered Trades Academy, which means the school does not get funding to pay the on-site building staff, who at the moment are an LBP builder, Trent Bray, a qualified builder, and Zach Southwick, an old boy of the school who has finished the second year of apprenticeship this year.
Delport explained any profit made from the sale of the houses is “basically zero profit” because the money made is based on the salaries of the two staff who run the programme for us.
“We need to sell the houses to pay the salaries for the builders, so basically, it’s a break-even scenario.”
As for this year, Delport said it had been a phenomenal one with a fantastic strike rate in terms of student output.
“The confidence of the teaching staff gets better and better. They know what to look for and they know how to guide the students to get better outcomes,” he said.
Moving into next year, things will look a bit different for HBHS Building Academy, with the school’s social housing provider not issuing new partnerships or memorandums of understanding with any building academies for any schools in New Zealand, due to budget constraints and reshuffling and everything changing for them with the new coalition Government.
However, Delport is excited about the future, while he said the change had forced the academy to take a step back. Hopefully, this leads to taking two steps forward.
“Moving forward, I will say we’ve graduated. We’ve spent three years working with social housing and in my opinion, that means we’ve now got our level 7 degree, or we’ve got our qualification and how to manage the Building Academy and its popularity has proven itself with the numbers of students coming in or applying to be in the course.
“So we are now stepping up to the next level, which means that we will be building privates, privately for clients, and run it a real business.
“Not that we haven’t, but it’s just part of the development and the growth of the programme.”
The school has decided to do private builds for the open market from next year onwards and is finalising plans.
“The sky’s the limit, so we want to see how we can build a Building Academy and give our students more exposure and more opportunity, and then possibly improve our footprint at school to build bigger, better houses for our local community.
“I am very excited for next year, the board of trustees fully supports the Building Academy, the vision of the Building Academy for next year and how they can support the Building Academy moving forward,” Delport said.
Maddisyn Jeffares became the editor of the Hawke’s Bay community papers Hastings Leader and Napier Courier in 2023 after writing at the Hastings Leader for almost a year. She has been a reporter with NZME for almost three years and has a strong focus on what’s going on in communities, good and bad, big and small. Email news tips to her at: maddisyn.jeffares@nzme.co.nz
