Editorial: Zoning's perverse effects

Zone cheats is a harsh description of parents who move temporarily into the designated district of Auckland Grammar School so that their child might claim a right to be enrolled. These parents are going to unusual trouble and expense to do the best they believe they can do for their child's education. They are working around rules set by the present Government, not the school.

Their children may be the sort of promising pupils Auckland Grammar School would have selected for entry if it was still allowed to choose applicants from outside its neighbourhood. And the parents, the "zone cheats", show by the lengths they have gone to that they are certainly the ambitious, supportive parents the school would welcome if it was allowed to.

But since it is not allowed to accept them it has had to turn very tough on them - too tough, now, for the comfort of the Ministry of Education. The ministry has upheld the appeals of 20 students who were going to have to leave the school after being enrolled on what the school held to be temporary residence in its zone.

Many of them had been living within the zone for years rather than months, according to the ministry. To force a pupil to leave the school after attending it for a year or two does seem harsh, but the headmaster, John Morris, says it is necessary to keep the school roll in check. He says that if pupils can qualify on the strength of a few months of residence in the zone, Grammar will be inundated, and unless the ministry endorses a longer qualifying period the school will have to go to court for a workable ruling.

Meanwhile, the education year is well advanced, and at last 20 pupils of Auckland Grammar and their parents are not left to worry whether they will be able to remain there. They are not cheats, they are victims of needless regulation and its typically perverse consequences.

There is absolutely no need for any school in Auckland to be restricted by zoning as strictly as Auckland Grammar has been. The Government argues its policy is necessary to ensure that every child can attend his or her nearest state school, but in a city such as Auckland no child lives very far from several schools. The real reasons for zoning popular schools are to stop them selecting the best applicants from anywhere and to help other schools maintain their numbers.

It is a policy designed by and for the providers of public education rather than to help individual children reach their maximum potential. It is based on a belief that it is more important to keep the same range of pupils in every school than to allow the brightest to work together and stretch each other. Educational theory believes firmly in a mixture, though it runs counter to the founding principle of cultural and sporting academies where it is thought that talent is best developed in challenging hothouses of excellence.

The tragedy of zoning is that without it there would eventually be more Auckland Grammars. If other schools were not protected by the system they would have to meet the unsatisfied demand for the likes of Grammar in order to maintain their roles. That is a prospect that threatens the power of public education controllers who have a powerful lobby in the Labour Party.

A change of Government will probably bring a relaxation of zoning, but until then schools such as Auckland Grammar will have to police an enrolment policy they don't want, and the Education Ministry will try to soften the impact of the very rules it has written. The school and the ministry are engrossed in an interesting chess game over zoning but the pawns, as always, are pupils trying to get on and the parents trying to help them.