Editorial: Time to let integrated schools grow

As schools reopen for another year it is reported once again students have had to be turned away from the increasingly popular "integrated" schools. It is time the Government took note of this trend and drew a lesson from it. Integrated schools are a compromise between the state school system and private schools. They receive substantial public funds - much more than private schools do - and sacrifice some of the independence private schools enjoy. But integrated schools retain much of the appeal of private schooling, judging by the demand for them. Just about all of them say they receive far more applicants than they can take.

Yet most integrated schools are Catholic schools or affiliated to other churches. The applicants they are turning away are, for the most part, students who are not of the same religion, although the schools seem happy to accommodate them if they can. The schools are under no illusions that it is their religion that attracts enrolment from outside their faith. Rather it is the values, standards and character that the schools stand for.

An integrated school offers something of the character of a private school at much less cost to parents. The state pays for its staffing and the school meets its own capital costs from the fees it can charge. The Government quite justifiably limits the permissible fees, to ensure that the education it subsidises is reasonably accessible to most. The result is a more affordable "private" school. Little wonder the schools have more applicants than they can accommodate.

The wonder is rather that the Government does not meet the demand by allowing integrated schools to grow. For it is not widely known that the rolls of integrated schools are capped. Why, you might wonder, would the Government limit the rolls of schools that are plainly satisfying a public preference? It is particularly odd when you consider that the Government limits their fees to make them more accessible. Why not allow them to provide more places for the same purpose? Indeed, why not encourage many more schools to adopt the integrated model?

The reason: if integrated schools grow it could be at the expense of enrolments in state schools. The Government is in fact a reluctant funder of independent services; it is ideologically committed to what it calls the principle of public provision. That is not a principle that seeks to give people what they plainly want, but rather what the ideologues want to give them.

Two new state secondary schools opened in Auckland this week. One of them, we read, has been "designed to encourage the concept of whanau". Its buildings are "whanau houses" where teaching rooms open out on to common spaces where pupils can learn informally as in a whanau. This might or might not be a good idea. The point is that it is not a response to evident public demand, it was conceived by people who believe they know what is good in education. They are the people who brought us the NCEA.

They purport to worry a great deal that if education simply provided what people wanted, the outcomes would be unequal, that young people would get the education their families were willing and able to pay for. That is a reason to maintain near-free state schools but those schools would survive if alternatives were allowed to grow.

While there is unsatisfied demand for more independent schools, there is also a fierce public attachment in this country to free schooling. Even the minimal "voluntary" fees of state schools often encounter resistance from parents who insist that free education is a sacred right of New Zealand citizenship. That is not an attitude that will disappear if everyone who wants to put their child in a semi-independent "integrated" school had a place available to them. They should have the choice.