Charter schools: Delivering choice to parents and time to teachers

Associate Minister for Education David Seymour.

After their disestablishment in 2018, what is the benefit in having a second attempt at charter schools?

I believe some of the operators will have new and innovative ways to help students who are struggling at school to succeed, especially neurodiverse students, where there is huge need.

What teachers are not hearing is that this is an enormous opportunity for education as a profession. It will give successful applicants freedom from the constant upheavals in education.

I’ve asked teachers many times what they would say if we could give them 10 years with no more political change. They said that’s the most amazing thing that could ever happen.

By signing a contract as a charter school for 10 years, you are giving yourself certain outputs that you need to hit, such as attendance and achievement. In return for that, your school receives its money on time in full and has the ability to choose its own destiny.

What I’m trying to do is create an environment where people who know more about this stuff than I ever will can set up schools that will work for them.

It’s a bit like the App Store, Apple doesn’t make the apps. They create the platform and set out the rules. But there’s a million different apps that Apple itself could never have imagined. In a way, that’s what we’d like to do. We think we’ll get new and better forms of education created by an empowered education profession.

Do you believe there’s a reluctance to embrace that level of autonomy?

If you’re confident you can achieve reasonable results, as set out in the contract, why wouldn’t you take the autonomy?

I’ve never met anyone in education who wouldn’t prefer to have more time and resources to put into what really got them into teaching, which is helping children reach their potential by giving them useful skills and knowledge.

Every school I visit says they would like more resources, more teacher aides, more people. Our education system is set up on a certain number of adults teaching a certain number of students. Adjusting that ratio is big money.
We don’t have much money, so we have to think.

What did you learn from the 2014 ‘pilot’?

The main thing we learned is that last time we attempted to largely transplant the state school funding model for smaller schools into charters and small state schools and new state schools.

I think the criticism that it was overfunded was unfair, and charter schools bore the brunt of that.

This time they’ll receive a per-student amount. The way to get more money will be to get more students. There will be a lot more schools, a lot more students. It’s going to be much bigger and frankly much more challenging for any future government to unwind.

Will they all have the same ratio of registered teachers to those with Limited Authority to Teach?

Contracts will state a minimum percentage of certificated teachers. We haven’t decided the exact ratio yet, but it will provide flexibility in who is hired and how the curriculum is delivered.

They could employ people in teaching positions who may not be registered with the Teaching Council if they negotiated in their contract to show those people had the skills, qualifications, and experience to raise student achievement.

A great number of teachers in the pilot weren’t registered with the Teaching Council and some of those were brilliant. There was a guy at Vanguard Military School who was teaching metal work – a former aircraft engineer from the Royal New Zealand Air Force. Students loved him.

What’s the problem? I think sometimes people forget who’s really important here.

David Seymour says charter schools offer curriculum flexibility that will better cater to students who face additional challenges.

What are priority learners and how do charter schools cater for them?

Our Government recognises that students are not all at the same points in their education and that some face additional challenges to succeed.

In the charter schools model, we call those with neurodiversity and a background of disadvantage and poverty priority learners.

These students still need to progress and achieve, and an advantage of charter schools is that there is flexibility to design curriculum and negotiate different ways of operating, which will allow them to better cater to students who are priority learners.

The schools just need to ensure they are meeting their requirements, such as ensuring educational outcomes are met and ensuring that tuition standards are at least equivalent to tuition given to students in state schools of the same year levels.

Ultimately, I believe charter schools will help children with different needs find an educational home. For example, there has been interest in focuses including Māori excellence, te reo Māori, Pacific values, STEM subjects and neurodiverse students, sports academies, military-style teaching, and single gender schools.

In the ‘pilot’ years, one kura in Northland only got one student to achieve NCEA in two years from a roll of almost 50 and was closed as a charter school. How will you help schools in the new model avoid a repeat of that?

The Authorisation Board will have a robust assessment process that will require sponsors to demonstrate they have the experience and capability to engage and support their students.

We’ve spoken with sponsors of previous Māori and Pacific partnership schools about what worked well, what they may have found challenging, and the types of support they feel would be useful to them. Those insights have informed how the new charter school model has been developed.

We know some students need more time and support to succeed. We’re still working through the performance management framework but we’re exploring ways to measure and account for differences in student background and progress when assessing school performance.

Will charter schools offer an alternative curriculum?

Yes. In a sense, it’s no different from Kristen School teaching the international baccalaureate or Auckland Grammar School teaching the Cambridge curriculum – they can do so as long as they are mapped to the
New Zealand Curriculum.

Charter schools will be closely scrutinised, and they still have to achieve a certain level in maths, reading and writing, like everyone else. The rules are still around attendance, achievement, child safety, finances and property.

These are the only schools in New Zealand that are contracted for achievement and attendance targets. Charter schools can be closed if they are not meeting their targets.

They might have greater flexibility with the curriculum, but there is also a legislated oversight and accountability that state schools are not subject to.

Could teachers with specialist skillsets earn more in a charter school than in the state sector?

They could earn more or they could earn less, but that is a real opportunity – to be paid on performance as judged by the school management.

A lot of people in education will see this as their big opportunity to get what they’ve always wanted: a chance to just get on with it.

Could we see new governance models emerge?

Often boards are dependent on the principal they are supposed to be holding to account in order to get an understanding of what the school is up to.

The opportunity now is to get outside governance structures in. For example, appoint people as Vanguard did and actually get stronger, more responsive governance that’s better for parents.

One of the things the consultant who analysed the pilot, Martin Jenkins, found is that innovation in management and governance is one of the key areas where charter schools can do a lot better.

Are we in danger of privatising the education system?

What exactly are we privatising?

I guess the strongest claim you could make is that the management of a charter school might be by a private company, but it’s more likely to be by a community trust as we saw in the pilot.

It’s important to understand that, like state schools, enrolment in a charter school is free (except for international students). There may be some property management fees where schools are based in sponsor-owned properties or, for example, the school was a state-integrated school and was charging attendance dues.

 Learn more about charter schools | kura hourua(external link)

Global failure or global success?

While unions say there is no evidence of the charter school model being successful, David Seymour says there’s plenty of evidence of success.

A 2023 study by the Stanford University Centre for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) found that because class sizes were smaller, students gained an average of 16 days of learning in reading and six days in maths in a school year compared to their matched peers in traditional public schools. 

By the time they get to the end of their education, they’re a year ahead. Almost 100 percent of schools in New Orleans are a charter model, resulting in higher graduation rates and increased college enrolment rates.

In the UK, 40 percent of primary schools and 80 percent of secondary schools are charter schools (known as academies). One paper showed that seven out of 10 academies that were underperforming as council-run schools earned good or outstanding ratings when they changed to the academy model. 

Read the study by Stanford University(external link).