Free schools: a legacy lost

By TIM WATKIN

Peter Garelja fingers the finance folder on the table and concedes this wasn't what he expected when 11 years ago he became a principal. Budgets, sure. Galas and activity fees, they've always been part of the school scene.

But the figures in the school ledger at Waitakere College, where Garelja has been principal six years, show something he had never anticipated. While $1.67 million of this year's income has come from the public purse in the form of the school's operating grant, another $1.06 million has come from its own fundraising, mostly international student fees and parent donations.

That represents an improvement. In 2001, the last year for which the Ministry of Education has nationwide figures, Waitakere received $1.24 million from the Government and - more - $1.61 million from fundraising.

Waitakere's not alone. In 2001, 78 of New Zealand's 304 secondary schools received more money from their own fund-raising than they did from the Operations Grant.

In papers released in the lead-up to its annual conference starting Tuesday, the PPTA revealed that while government grants had increased 44 per cent between 1992 and 2001, secondary school expenditure had increased 58 per cent. The gap was being bridged by what are called locally raised funds - parental donations, fees and, most significantly, foreign fee-paying students - which grew a staggering 203 per cent in the same period.

In 1992, locally raised funds made up 9 per cent of total income received by secondary schools, including teacher salaries. In 2001, that almost doubled to 17.3 per cent.

When state schools receive such a significant percentage of their income from private rather than public sources, serious questions are raised about public education; its quality, its equity, and whether it can still be called free.

The answers to these questions are vital for a decile four school such as Waitakere, surrounded as it is by streets of solid weatherboard and brick houses built in the 1940s and 50s, and the equally solid working class values formed about the same time. Free public education was a foundation stone.

Garelja knows those values because he grew up here. His family has been around these parts for a century. On the wall behind his desk hangs a picture of his Dalmatian grandfather in the mud of the west Auckland gum fields, and on the hardest days Garelja looks at the picture and thinks "things could be worse". It's thanks to the free public education system they're not. Garelja was the first person in his family to pass School Certificate, and that gave him choices. He went teaching, hoping to give the next generation more choices again.

He's doing that, but only because of the money he gets each year from international students.

"We are out to raise student achievement to the highest level," he says. "If we have to get distracted because we have to turn into entrepreneurs there is a real cost."

He shrugs. He's not comfortable whingeing but he's frustrated at how far we've moved from Labour Prime Minister Peter Fraser's promise when he and Clarence Beeby over-hauled the education system in the 1940s.

"Every person, whatever the level of his academic ability, whether he be rich or poor, whether he live in town or country, has the right, as a citizen, to a free education of a kind for which he is best suited and to the fullest extent of his powers," Fraser declared.

No Government since has dared to contradict him and New Zealanders have never voted to end that free education. As recently as last year a "vision" statement on education from this Labour-led Government mimicked its forefather's words: "We aim to improve the chances of all our children, regardless of family background."

Yet principals now argue free education is at death's door - the only question is which side of the door it's on.

"There's a substantial gap between the ideal and the reality [of free education]," says Russell Trethewy, chair of the PPTA's Principals' Council and principal of Freyberg High School in Palmerston North. "We're providing for some but not adequately for others."

Graham Young, vice-president of the Secondary Principals' Association and principal at Tauranga Boys' College, says, "The reality is that schools get the choice between paying their power bill and buying computers. It's Hobson's choice ... We could not prepare a budget based solely on the Operations funding the Government offers our school."

Bali Haque, principal of Pakuranga College, sums it up. "Any school that tries to operate on just what the Government gives them will not be delivering the curriculum adequately."

According to the Education Act, "Every person who is not a foreign student is entitled to free enrolment and free education at any state school during the period beginning on the person's fifth birthday and ending on the first day of January after the person's 19th birthday."

What it doesn't spell out is what that obliges the Government to provide. The closest thing to an explanation comes in a Ministry of Education circular from 1998, which states "the right to free education implies that there should be no charge for materials used in the delivery of the curriculum". So principals presume government funding should pay for the basic curriculum.

Principals claim it's no longer doing that.

"The Government is failing to live up to its obligations under the law ... They're derelict in their duties," says Trethewy.

"Much of what we used to do with locally raised funds was to get a bit of cream into the school," Young adds. "Now those funds are also supporting the delivery of curriculum, particularly in the area of employing teachers."

Most schools already employ more teachers than the Government pays them for. With a new collective contract beginning next year, teachers' non-contact hours will rise from three to four a week. That means schools have to hire more teachers. But there's no new government money.

"It's a strange world where the Government makes an agreement with the union that schools have to pay for and the Government gives us nothing extra. Big schools like ours are looking at hundreds of thousands in additional costs," says Haque.

Principals line up other examples of new, unfunded costs such as chairs for assembly. There's computer technology - ICT in school jargon. While parents might assume computers are now an essential part of their child's free education and Education Minister Trevor Mallard talks up their importance, the vast majority of computers in our schools weren't paid for by the Government.

Trethewy says that, remarkably, this is the first Government to specifically fund computer equipment. "It's just that they're specifically underfunding it."

Freyberg spends more than $100,000 a year on ICT. It gets $16,000 from government.

Supporters and detractors alike also point to the NCEA. It's costing Freyberg an extra $50,000 a year and Papakura at least $80,000. Tauranga Boys is spending an extra $350 a month in photocopying alone. While the ministry and NZQA have extra funding for the new system, schools have not.

"We can't go on absorbing costs like that," says Trethewy.

And while schools are funded for a curriculum from days goneby, parents are expecting more for their children.

"The expectations and requirements are getting higher, quite rightly," says Haque, "but we don't see the dollars chasing that."

Mallard says this Government has increased the operating grant $151 million between 1999 and 2002, a rise of 11.7 per cent per pupil in real terms.

It's impossible to say precisely when free education started to die. For a start, it never quite existed. When education was nationalised in 1877, all high schools charged fees. When free secondary places were first guaranteed for pupils who achieved the proficiency in 1908, funds for secondary school libraries were raised by both school boards and the Government on a pound-for-pound basis.

After World War II, when secondary education was at its most free, there were camps to subsidise, sports gear and manual materials to buy, although camps, manual and sports were all part of the curriculum. Galas and cake stalls were always used to top up government funding.

The issue here is one of degree. State funding is paying for less and less of what could be considered core curriculum.

School fee researcher Sandy Latimer says schools' reliance on locally raised funds began with Tomorrow's Schools in 1989. Before that the Department of Education paid most school bills. Under this system, schools have been bulk-funded an operating grant and told to manage their budgets.

Then government funding was frozen through most of the 90s as the National Governments told principals they were in charge of their own funds and had to prioritise.

Struggling to fund the curriculum, schools went looking for money elsewhere. They turned to fees and donations.

Ministry figures show that New Zealand parents now pay an average $314.61 in subject and activity fees per pupil per year, plus another $75 in voluntary donations.

But the main source of locally raised funds has become international students. They bring schools about $250 million, money that has funded many a new library or science block, alongside new computers and teachers.

"But that's hidden the reality from the public," worries Garelja, "that if we didn't have international students your child would be in a much bigger class and we wouldn't be able to run the same [subject] options."

Foreign students have also bought the risks of the private sector into public education. Schools borrow on the back of projected foreign-fee earnings and some are "critically dependent" on them, says John Grant, principal of Kaipara College in Helensville, who wrote a PPTA report on the trend.

The danger has been highlighted this week by Mallard's trip around Asia trying to reassure the market after the collapse of the Modern Age English language school. Now, a bad reputation or uncontrolled world events such as war or Sars places our schools at financial risk.

"What would happen if the overseas student market collapses? Schools would be bankrupted," says Grant.

Even Mallard admits "concern" about the exposure of some schools, and says there are "practical and policy issues requiring attention".

This increase in revenue from fundraising has created serious inequities. Schools in poorer areas can't ask for the kind of donations sought by those whose parents have more money. Neither can they attract overseas students.

Even the education minister who introduced Tomorrow's Schools, David Lange, is worried by the reliance on locally raised funds.

"They're spending it on core things they wouldn't have dreamed of having to spend it on 15 years ago."

Lange doesn't accept that Tomorrow's Schools is to blame.

'It's a question of political will. You can't blame the funding structure for a lack of funds, you can blame the politicians for not providing the money."

The money's there, he says. The Government could increase operating grants "15 times over before breakfast" if it had the will.

At its conference this week the PPTA will urge the Government to find the will to keep Fraser's legacy alive. Meanwhile, Garelja will sit under the picture of his grandfather digging in the mud, and he too will dig - through the mud of school finances trying to find more choices, more opportunities for his pupils.