Hamilton’s Hillcrest High School student refused to enrol student for more than a year

Hillcrest High School in Hamilton refused to take a secondary student, despite Ministry of Education instructions telling school authorities to accept the teen. Photo / Mike Scott

A Hamilton 16-year-old has given up on ever finishing his secondary education after being locked out of his local high school for a year and a half, his parents say.

The teen was excluded from Hamilton’s Hillcrest High School as a 14-year-old in March last year after getting into a fight on school grounds and also being involved in an earlier incident.

The family then paid to privately tutor the teen through 2023 before the Ministry of Education agreed to review his case.

After the review, the ministry issued a December legal order – known officially as a directive – telling Hillcrest High to re-enrol the teen.

The school refused to comply with the order.

The family says that a year and a half without school – including seven months waiting for the school to follow the directive – was too much for their son.

The ministry and family eventually agreed to withdraw the directive last week.

Meanwhile, the ministry had helped the teen enrol in a polytechnic course.

The past year and a half had been “absolute hell” for the family, with the teen becoming withdrawn and low as his friends dropped off and he lost contact with his age group, his mum said.

“His self-esteem, his whole mental health went quite bad,” she said.

Hillcrest High School's principal Christine Williams says her board of trustees acted in the best interests of the school community. Photo / Mike Scott

Hillcrest High School principal Christine Williams said her school acted for the good of its school community.

“Our Board of Trustees acted in the best interests of the staff and students at our kura,” she said.

“As you have commented, the ministry agreed to revoke the directive.”

Mum believes Hillcrest High one of three schools defying Ministry of Education

The teen’s mum said she’s speaking out because she wants the ministry to look more closely at the actions of the Hillcrest High board and its former principal.

The Herald this month revealed three New Zealand high schools had been refusing to enrol students that the Ministry of Education had legally told them they had to accept.

Overall, the ministry sent 261 legal orders in the past year to unwilling schools, telling them they must enrol students excluded or expelled from elsewhere, Official Information Act (OIA) data showed.

And while schools in 251 cases had accepted the ministry’s orders, three unnamed schools – two in Auckland and one in Waikato – had refused to comply.

The teen’s mum said she believed Hillcrest High was the Waikato school mentioned in the OIA.

She believed the school had been wrong to draw the process out so long and refuse to follow the ministry’s legal order.

For weeks on end, the school had ignored and refused to communicate with the family, even when they used a lawyer, she claimed.

This was despite her volunteering at the school and two of the teen’s brothers having also studied at Hillcrest High.

She also questioned why the Ministry of Education didn’t enforce its legal directive and make the school accept their son.

Still, she said she was grateful to the ministry for its efforts.

Its team recently worked with the head of a polytechnic course to get her son enrolled in the course on short notice.

The polytechnic team knew her son’s story and took him in, saying would they watch over him and that they think their course is “the place for him”, she said.

“They were like, ‘We got you’,” she said.

“And that is just so nice to hear at the end of it all because it’s been so bad.”

She now also believes the hospitality course is “probably the best thing” for her son.

“This will bring him up to have a bit more confidence.”

‘Often exclusion is due to challenging behaviours’: Ministry

The Ministry of Education didn’t answer a Herald question asking why it didn’t enforce its directive to Hillcrest High.

It didn’t believe it was appropriate to go into detail about the teen’s personal information.

Jocelyn Mikaere, deputy secretary of the ministry’s Te Tai Whenua Central operation, said the ministry only approves directives “in exceptional circumstances where we are unable to reach an agreement with a school to re-enrol a student”.

“We know that excluding a student is not a decision that schools take lightly - often the exclusion is the result of complex and challenging behaviours,” she said.

After a directive is issued, the ministry tries to continue working with whānau and schools to manage the student’s transition back into education, sometimes by helping get additional support systems in place at the school, she said.

Secondary Principals Association president Vaughan Couillault says schools infrequently refuse to comply with Ministry of Education directives telling them to accept students, and when they do, they usually have a good reason to do so. Photo / Dean Purcell

However, actually forcing the school to comply with the directive “would be the very last option” and only used “when every other option has been exhausted”, Mikaere said.

“In this case, the student has identified a new pathway to progress his education and training with the support of his family, and we wish him every success,” she said.

‘Students have a right to be safe’: Principals Association president

Vaughan Couillault, president of the Secondary Principals’ Association of NZ, said schools typically work closely with the Ministry of Education to get students back into learning.

And the instances when they pushed back against the ministry were “really infrequent”.

He said he could not speak about the Waikato incident but schools in general had a responsibility to their existing students and staff to keep them safe and protect their learning environment.

“The rights of everyone is important but that works both ways,” he said.

“So the excluded student has a right to education, but the students that are already enrolled in the school have a right to be safe so that they can continue with their educations.”

He said schools that pushed back against the ministry typically did so because they hadn’t had all their questions and concerns answered.

It could be that they don’t believe the behaviour in the excluded student has changed or because they have not received the financial or teaching assistance they believe they need to accommodate the student, Couillault said.

“In my experience, when there’s pushback, there’s always a piece of information that’s missing, something that hasn’t been done,” he said.

Schools did not take the process lightly, he said.

Meanwhile, the Waikato teen’s mum feels Hillcrest High School’s attitude has let her son down.

“It’s horrendous for a young teenager to have been left without education,” she said.

She’s now looking forward to her son gaining confidence and skills at his new course, she said.