Headmaster’s Interview (transcript)

J. Wilson, R. Taggart, K. Ginn of the Chronicle Committee approach the Headmaster on issues and challenges facing Grammar, present and future.

During your past six years as Headmaster of Auckland Grammar School what would you consider your two or three most important contributions to the running of the school, and perhaps to the school policy and ethos?

If you're looking over that time, there has been lots of change. I think that probably one change has been in improved communication with students and with the community. When I arrived there was no newsletters, there was no prospectus, there was no course outline, there was no academic handbook, there was no provision for careers advice and so on. So in that area, the communication area, there has been improvements. And I think it’s part of how society and how the school has to evolve, in that we are part of the community, and we can't just think that since the school is long established, we can carry on doing what we’ve done for the last hundred years, and that it is not going to make any difference. We have to adapt and change, and that’s one of the major ones I think, communication, and bringing the school more to the community I suppose. So that's number one.

I suppose secondly there’s been huge improvements in the property side of the school and that's siting to the facilities for teachers. And of course, although the buildings don't make a school, teachers seem to teach better if they’ve got better facilities. So there’ve been improvements here, in the Main Block, which some of you will remember I would imagine, what it was like beforehand. It was an absolute shambles. It was like sort of a second Bosnia really. The classrooms were awful. So that's been a huge improvement and things like extensions to the Library, which is a recent one, that was needed. The previous extensions in 1969 when the roll was about 1100 and we were living in that sort of environment. So that's been a major. The new extension to the specialist block, the improvements to the swimming pool and the changing rooms there, and a number of other things that have gone on.

Linked into that is better computer facilities as well. Again in ’93 when I came here, there were only about 15 computers in the whole school, of which half didn't work, and now we’ve got two full rooms and little pods around the place. And again, that goes with the fact that computers are now essential. We’ve adopted a policy of cross-curricula, so that you’d actually use the computers across curricula rather than as a curriculum subject. And I think that is the modern way to go. So there has been a huge improvement there in terms of that.

And this has all been funded through a mixture of Ministry of Education money and Old Boy money?

No, not true. The computers: nothing has come from the Ministry for that, we get no money for computers at all. So that's really come from our own money that we’ve just stashed away.

Operation funds?

Yes. Donations as well. We have some parents who are very grateful for the education their sons have got. One particular family gave fifty thousand dollars towards computer technology. When you look at it, we've spent probably pretty close to one million dollars in the last six years on computers and facilities for computers. So, that was only a little drop in the ocean, but it was still very, very helpful to get us started on getting the computers up and running. So the funding for that does not come from the Ministry.

The funding for the property, some of it has come from the Ministry, they’ve funded totally the extension to the specialist block, they funded half of the library extensions and the rest is all our money. So, we’re in a privileged position; I'm very lucky that we have got the money and we can afford to do that. But of course that’s one of the challenges of the new millennium which we’ll probably touch on later.

And Grammar has been a very strong advocate of bulk funding…

Sure. Well, we haven’t actually been a very strong advocate. Deliberately, we haven't been an advocate to be honest because we didn't want our name to be used as a tool by the Ministry. But we are very strongly in support of it.

So how would you feel that it would affect Grammar if perhaps a Left-wing coalition was to gain power?

It wouldn't affect us very positively at all. I've met with Trevor Mallard and we’ve had talks about that, and he actually can’t find, I think, any reasons to get rid of bulk funding, I think he sees a real advantage of it. But unfortunately it’s been a plank of Labour policy ever since they actually introduced the concept themselves, and then a year later said, "No, no, we don’t want it". I mean it was their idea in the first place, it was a David Lange idea. And then suddenly it becomes public feeling that this is not the right way to go. So we would lose a little bit of independence, we would lose flexibility in terms of staffing, and we’d be subject to dictates from central governments. And in a modern society it’s ridiculous that a government based in Wellington can tell a school up in Auckland how to staff the school and they haven’t got a clue about it. They’ve got no idea. They’re bureaucrats, not teachers, and not involved in the whole scheme of things. So we’d lose that, we’d lose some money. There’s no doubt about that. But we didn’t go in it for the extra money. The first year we did bulk funding we gained about 35 000 dollars, which in the budget of pretty close to twelve million, is nothing. And the money is always only used on staffing. When we went to the bulk funding the protocol that I wrote up, which the staff and the board agreed to, was that any profits we make go back into staffing. And that either means we have more staff than we should have and/or we pay our staff a bonus at the end of each year, and we’ve done that every year for the last three years, and we’ve also got additional staff. We’ve got about four-and-a-half, maybe five teachers in addition to what we should have, and all that’s through moneys that we have made over that time.

So what opportunities do you see that perhaps could be pursued to increase Grammar’s independence in the next few years?

Well we’re pursuing something at the moment. There’s a section in the Education Act called Section 156, which allows you to remain a state school, but have more independence under a clause called "special character". The "special character" clause is a very, very interesting one, it has never really been used by anybody in the past. It came in 1989 with the Education Act of 89, and it was originally intended for schools that were really alternative. Like, for example, the one in Christchurch where there’s a school without walls, where the kids go to the museum to do their lessons or go to the park or go to the shopping mall. So you set up a school without walls, and it came under special character. There’s also a school in Wellington set up by Susan Baragwana for pregnant teenage girls, and that’s obviously a special character, it’s a different thing: these kids would have nothing if it wasn’t for that. So it’s unusual for a school like ours which is a traditional, normal school to even think about this whole concept of special character that we are doing. I’ve had a couple of meetings, I’ve been to Wellington once for a meeting and they came up here in the holidays to chat to me. So some people in the Ministry are interested in helping us to pursue that option and that would allow us to not have to have a zone. It would allow us to retain the independence and flexibility but remain a state school, because that’s our heritage and we want to actually stay a state school, we don’t want to become a private school.

And one of the important aspects of this Grammar ethos, I suppose, is the exam system. Could you describe how significant you believe that Grammar’s lobbying into the assessment discussion process has been?

I think that in the Unit Standards debate, which is now over, we were integral in creating a strong lobby group and also creating a group of like-minded schools. It was almost like an informal alliance of like-minded schools, and myself and Dr. Baker were at the forefront of that, and I spent a lot of time working through that. We got good support from other schools around Auckland like McCleans College, which is a very good academic school, and around places: Westlake Girls, Westlake Boys, Avondale College, and a few schools like that, and also outside of Auckland too. And they weren’t all strong academic schools, but they were schools that felt that you need to have that exam thing as a goalpost, a target, especially for the boys who respond much better to that than, say, girls do. We needed that as part of the educational ethos, not just of Grammar, but of the country. So I think that we made a major impact there. I was on the Principal’s League Group in Wellington for six years over which I was a lone voice, apart from one other guy, going against Unit Standards. And what we were saying was proven, because it was based not on emotion or on bias, but actually based on research. I am pretty widely read on assessment methodology, and this Unit Standards debate was a loser right from the beginning, it would never work, it has never worked anywhere in the world so why would it work here in particular. And we won that debate. But what’s happened now is that with Achievement 2001, they’re sort of trying to resurrect Unit Standards in a different name, while retaining external examinations up to a point. And the meeting I was in Wellington a couple of weeks ago, I wasn’t particularly happy with the way that was going, and have written since on that. There is another meeting in early November which I have to go down to on the same topic. So, we have got to remain a strong lobby group. Part of our role as a strong school and with a very, very strong brand is that we have to show national leadership and hopefully inform others who, really, are not as well read or as understanding of things as we may well be. And we don’t expect anyone to agree with our philosophy, but at least to have a look at the situation and say, "Well hey, there could be an element of truth in what they are saying". And so, national leadership and things like the assessment debate and qualifications and exams is a critical role. It’s a role the board expect me to play, as well as the day-to-day running of the school.

Becoming a special character school, how would that free us from NZQA?

It’s an interesting one. NZQA are really a dead letter now, they’re really just a quality assurance body who will run exams, and the Ministry are the people who are running this Achievement 2001 thing. But your question is still valid, however. It would give us a bit more flexibility to have a look at overseas curricula and qualifications such as the International Baccalauriat, for example.

We’ve seen the development of a very strong Sixth Form exam set up privately. Would this be, perhaps, the birth of a Fifth, Sixth and Seventh Form similar?

It could. I don’t personally think it will. To be brutally honest, the Sixth Form External Exam is not a particularly strong exam, and although it serves its purpose, particularly to schools like ourselves and other boys schools: Palmerston North, Rosmini, and a few others, I would prefer that examination systems were nationally recognised and run by a nationally accredited body. Because then the credibility is there, that’s what you’ve got to look at. And on that, my main concern with Achievement 2001, is that what we’ll end up with is something that is not credible overseas. Like at the moment, your Bursary exam will get you into a university in the States, in the UK, in Australia and Canada, not a problem at all. They will do the equivalences. But if you get a qualification with like Achievement 2001, or NCEA as it’s called, which really will be a mish-mash of all sorts of things, there’s no way in the world it can be credible. Because whether you like it or not, you do have winners and losers, and you do need to know what the ranking order is, and if you haven’t got that then you won’t get access to international universities. So it will free us up, it will allow us to perhaps have a look at things. I’m doing some research right now on the International Baccalauriat, which I’ve always pooh-poohed in the past a little because I thought that the Bursary exam was a very good exam - it covers 90% of the boys and girls in the seventh form and you’ve got scholarship for the other 10%. But if Bursary’s not going to look as it looks now, then we are going to have to look at something for our top 30% of boys, and the for other people it’ll be a fantastic challenge – it’s a great course. But again, I’m reluctant to go away from a New Zealand based curriculum, because we’re a New Zealand school. But if we have to, and it’s forced on us, then it’s something we have to reconsider seriously.

You mentioned an expansion of the curricula. Obviously Spanish has just been introduced into the school. Do you see any potential for further new subjects?

Yes, but you've got to be careful. There's pressure on the Ministry all the time to add things on. For example we've now got a P.E. and health syllabus, which is just enormous compared to what we teach now. It involves teaching spirituality, sexuality, and a whole host of things that we are not equipped to do to be honest. And if we teach that, what do we drop for it? Do we drop periods in Maths? or English? because we've only got a certain number of hours. We now have to teach technology as a subject and it’s a huge syllabus. There are six strands that you have to cover, and we haven't got the facilities for it for a start. But again, if that comes in, what you drop out?

I think to answer your question in a roundabout way, we've always focused on the tradition cannon of academic subjects. We haven't gone into Journalism and Media, and Dance and Drama. We haven’t gone into Journalism, Media and Dance and Drama and so on, we consider those to be more co-curricular or extra curricular. And to use the old phrase of ‘stick to your knitting’, what we’re really good at is teaching the Physics, the Chemistry, the History, the Geography, the English, Maths and that’s where I really see that we’ve got a niche. I think once you start diversifying to much, and you’re going too broad, you end up not doing particularly well, you try and be everything to everybody and end up doing very little, very well. I think that what we do is we focus on a strong point and we do that well, and that’s where I see that we’ll probably continue. In terms of new academic-type subjects like Spanish, we dropped one language, German, for Spanish, because there was no validity in maintaining German when boys don’t want to do it. I’m hopeful that Spanish, as more of an international language, will attract more boys. It’s actually going to be a struggle, because more girls do languages than boys and it’s always going to be a struggle in a boys’ school to get strong language numbers. There could well be other scope in the future for change, but I don’t see in the next 5 years any major change in curriculum really.

The ERO always criticises the school for its exclusion of Maori language, at the junior level particularly, you don’t see a…

Well they didn’t criticise us last time; they asked questions. They said, "Why aren’t you doing it?" and we have offered it as a correspondence course a few years ago. We offered a correspondence course in the senior school, we got a few boys who got involved, and we brought a tutor around to do work with that. There were a particular group of boys who were into the Maori cultural group that we had, and also to Maori culture and language itself. But it didn’t really work out. The course wasn’t a particularly good course, the tutor travelled from Bombay to come up here, and it was a whole range of issues. Interest got lost, and we’ve never ever had a real demand for it. We know from parents ringing us up what subjects they want boys to do here, and Maori language is never ever been mentioned in my time here. Nobody’s ever written to me and said, "Look, we want to do Maori language". And also, you’ve got to be able to have a programme for somebody to teach; it’s no good having just one class in the third form. And you have to prioritise. We’ve got a very small Maori population here, which is sad, I would like that to bigger but it’s around about 3% at the moment, which is only low, and it’s not one to try and to attract good Maori boys to apply, but they don’t apply.

In terms of the role, obviously there’s a public meeting next week regarding zoning, what do you see as the next step for fighting for the exclusion for zoning? For instance, you’ve talked about the curriculum of moving towards a special status school, do you see that as being an option for also resolving the zoning issue?

Obviously it is one possibility, I’m not sure whether we’ll pursue the special character idea because it’s a huge commitment on our part to do that, but I think you’ve probably got to ignore that as a solution to the zoning issue. The zoning issue is only an issue in the minds of the Ministry because legally we’re correct in what we are doing, we don’t have to have a zone, and there are lots of reasons why we don’t want a zone. We feel that compared with 10 years ago, this school is much more reflective of Auckland than it was then. Then, it was pretty much an elitist school: you had to be white, and have plenty of money to live in the Epsom/Remuera areas to go to Auckland Grammar, and the board didn’t feel at the time that was necessarily what the school was all about. If you read George Grey’s charter behind me every morning, you’ll see that it mentions all socio-economic groups and all races, and we actually take that seriously, and so the idea of not having a zone meant that it did give us a bit of leeway. But, we still take all the kids from around here, and we have very few complaints from parents that we don’t take boys from the immediate area. So it just gives us scope to go into South Auckland or West Auckland or East Auckland, and broaden the range of people that are here. We now have something like about 45 nationalities within the school, which is huge, and the European numbers are around about 64% whereas 10-15 years ago you’d be looking at probably 90%. There’s a big, big difference.

So you feel that perhaps the re-introduction of stringent zoning could have a negative effect on the character of the school in general?

I think that it’ll change the nature of the school, but then again it depends on how big do you zone? There’s nothing to stop us saying, "OK, well, our zone is Mountain Road and Owens Road and Mount Eden Road", and just go round the mountain. And that would be a cunning way of doing it, and that seems an easy solution, except that if the Labour Party get in, their policy on enrolments is that once you’ve taken everybody within your zone, the rest of the boys are balloted. That’s anachronistic to us, as you can well imagine, but it’s also anachronistic to most families. How many families are going to put at risk the future education of their child to a guy drawing a name out of a hat? In fact it’s unfair, because if families are prepared to invest time and effort into, say, putting you through musical instrument classes or involvement in sport or debating or whatever, shouldn’t you be able to tell me about that? and maybe they’ve done it because they want you coming to Grammar. And you’re not going to get any advantage from that, so in that way, fairness and equity is an issue too.

So we could have a small zone, or we could have a big zone. You see, the other option is where we say, "Well, this is the only state boys school in Auckland at the moment, therefore the isthmus is our zone, this is the boys Grammar school for Auckland". And so we won’t have a zone around Epsom and Remuera, we’ll take the whole isthmus from Rosebank Peninsula over to the Orakei Creek. That will be our area. Now, the problem there is that there’ll be too may numbers, and so then how do you differentiate? Well, you need to have criteria. Under the Act you’re not allow to have criteria or priority for enrolment.

We’re not stupid, but basically we think that a sphere of influence would allow us to go and take kids from what the obvious areas are. Like if you live in Parnell, we’re the only school. We’ve got to take ‘reasonably convenient’ as a given, so if you live in Parnell, you’ve got nowhere else to go, so all our boys there come here. For boys around here we are the most reasonably convenient school: obviously they come here. Mount Eden Road and western Mount Eden Road is also a natural sphere of influence for us. Now, under the old zoning, and this is the ludicrous situation, that was not the case. The Mount Albert and the Grammar zone actually was Mount Eden Road. So if you live in Essex Road, which I used to live in, from which I could walk to school in 5 minutes, I was zoned to Mount Albert, even though I could walk to Grammar. So if I lived in View Road or Bellvue Road, I’d walk over the mountain, I’d be here in 2 minutes. That was zoned for Mount Albert. So, zoning is not perfect, it’s arbitrary, and who’s to say it’s the right way to go? It seems ludicrous to me that that was the zone. So by having sphere of influences, it allows you that common sense and say, "Well, obviously, if you live in View Road and Bellvue and Essex and Fairview and Woodside, we’re the closest school, we’re reasonably convenient", so obviously, you look at that area. So we’d much rather do that. But what the Ministry wants to, and it’s purely a pragmatic thing from their point-of-view, is that if your mum rings up and says, "I live in Seccums Ave, I want to know which is my reasonably convenient school that I will definitely be accepted into", they want to be able say, "Well, if you live in Seccum’s Ave, there’s the geographic zone, therefore you go to Auckland Grammar". So, they just want to be able to have that certainty and we’re not quite prepared to do that. We’re not being bloody-minded about it, we just doing what we think would be sensible, and we don’t want to change the nature and character of the school too much.

Going back to building development, obviously there’s been a lot of construction and development in the past few years, are there any further plans in the pipeline for the new millennium?

Yes there are. First of all, we’ve got to get rid of the prefabs, that’s number one, because they’re an eyesore and shouldn’t be here. Ministry policy has always been that every school had the have up to a percentage of their classrooms in relocatables. The reason behind that was that schools’ roles went up and down, and so if your role went down, they’d take some away, if your role went up, they’d take some bring some more on. But the difference here is that the role is what I want it to be, because there’s numbers queuing up all the time, and we turn away 400-500 for third alone, so I can make the role what I want. We’re settling on about 2030-2040 for next year, that’s the role that we think we can cope with. This year went down a bit, deliberately, but we feel that we could do with a bit more. So 2030, get rid of the prefabs and build an alternative block, because that’s what our role will be. But they’re not really playing ball with us, because they want to go to 2500. And I don’t want to do that, because there’s not enough hard area around here: if it’s raining and the fields are closed, were do you go? It also means that we can’t have full assemblies, because there can’t be 2500 boys in the assembly, and that’s really important in the running of the school. So they’re not really playing ball, because we’re not really playing ball with them, I suppose. They really want to grow what they call ‘successful schools’. So they want to grow Epsom, they want to grow us, they want to grow Onehunga, Mount Roskill, Avondale, Lynfield - schools that are in demand. They want to grow those before they build any new schools, and they’ve bought this land over at Epsom, but they don’t really want to build there, they’d rather that we got bigger so that we wouldn’t have to because it’s cheaper. What we’d like is a new permanent block, probably where the five-courts are now, that’s a possibility. We’ve had some diagrams and drawings done on that, and then we’d shift the prefabs off and we’d make that prefab area into a recreation area for the boys, and that would be partly grass, and probably partly artificial turf, so, doing a bit of both up there. That’s my plan, but money-wise, that’s another issue. The second big project would be to put a new sports hall down on lower field where we’ve spent a lot of money on the rugby field. So that area there would have a hockey turf, it would have a rugby field - a very good quality rugby field - and also a new sports stadium, which we would rent or use as a community resource during the day or at night when we’re not using it. And that way, we’d qualify for lotteries commission money and ASB Bank Trust money as well.

Part of it, I guess, for facilitating those sorts of things has been the creation of a number of non-teaching positions in the executive, notably a Business Manager, and very uniquely for a state school, a Development Manager. Have these appointments so far been a worthwhile investment?

The Business Manager was an absolutely essential appointment, with 12 million dollars it’s a business. But it’s a business that can’t make a profit, but it can’t make a loss either. And my strength is not in accounting. I’m a historian, that’s my subject, and a geographer, and a manager and an interest in curriculum assessment, and although we had an accountant doing that, we needed more. It’s become a lot more sophisticated, we have investments that we have to manage and to do with a business manager, we were actually slow out of the blocks with that. Most schools of our size had business managers 4-5 years ago, whilst we were sort of coping with myself keeping an overview. So we had to get help. So now we’ve got somebody involved with the school who has done a great job, and we really know where we stand with our money nowadays. We’ve done a whole lot of rationalisation, we’re looking at our fixed assets, we’re looking at our resources outside and seeing if they’re well invested and so on. So it’s been a huge boom to us and it’s absolutely essential. Most schools now, no matter what size, they might call them different things, they might call them executive officer, or bursar, or whatever, but they’re all going somewhere, and they have to have them.

Director of Development is a different kettle of fish, we actually haven’t appointed one yet; we’re interviewing on Friday morning at 8 o’clock for one. And that’s an interesting one, because most state schools in New Zealand have never had one, and the only reason that we feel it’s viable for us is because we have a huge tradition, and a huge community of interest our there which we think would support us. We’ve done six months work now of feasibility study, Roger (Hillu?) _________ came in as the Director of Development to scope exercise, and he’s has done a tremendous amount of work. We’ve had experts in to interview different aspects of the Grammar community, and we feel that it is viable and that we can do that. So we were going to appoint somebody, hopefully on Friday, after we’ve done all the reference checks after that and they’ll start the job, we hope, within a month or six weeks and get the thing under way. The idea behind that, though, is not just to get money to build buildings, because we’ve got to think perhaps more laterally there, and the greatest resource that we’ve got is our teaching staff. And it’s getting harder and harder to get male teachers. 71% of the teaching service is female, and we’re not averse to appointing females at all, but at the end of the day, parents demand of us that there should be more role models at the school, that’s part of the deal. So we’re looking at fundraising for property and improvements, but also so that I can look after my staff better, whether that’s in financial terms or better facilities. But financial is obviously one thing we’re looking at: can we pay our teachers better money to attract new teachers in? But also to retain very good teachers, rather than to leave and go off to a private school where you get a house on-site for free, or leave to go into business or some other thing. And we just have to look after our teachers better, and of course the whole accountability thing comes into that. Now teachers are on performance pay of a sort, it’s a pretty soft sort, not as rigorous as the one just introduced in the UK, but it’s still there. And that means if you’re going to have performance of praise, then you’re going to have a sort of performance pay concept within your school, and then you really do have to look at how you reward those who are really doing a good job. And you know who are they are, you probably know them as well as I do. You know when you go to a class and you’re really going to get a good deal, or whether you’re just going to get an OK deal, or whether you’re going to get a slack deal.

Could you basically just quickly outline the way the pseudo-performance pay actually works at our school?

There’s a national collective contract which the PPTA negotiate every couple of years, but it usually takes 3 years to get through, and in the new collective contract the Government insisted there was a performance pay clause. The way the thing worked out is that there are, what they call, professional standards of teaching, and so, say a teacher comes in here and he starts on $30,000. For his next pay up, in the old days it was automatic, if you’ve done a year you go to 32, the next year 33, next year 35, and you work your way up. So you get rewarded for your tenure… (Question not needed for transcript)

And the staff, have they generally embraced this performance pay system?

The new collective? Well, they really haven’t got any choice, it’s part of their contract that they’ve signed… (Question not needed for transcript)

Do you see a need for a stronger introduction of performance pay?

It’s interesting that. Would I would like is a pot of money that I can say, "Well OK, this person has an utterly wonderful job in the classroom, the Bursary exam results have just sky rocketed, it was obviously down to him; there’s something there for you at the end of the day". The problem with that is that if you do it just on results – we have streaming – and so, somebody’s got to have the bottom Maths class in the 7^th form and somebody’s got to have the bottom Physics class; how would you balance it all up? And I don’t want to be spending all my time as a final arbiter of what the pay of each person in the staff is. You can see that that’s not a good use of my time. So, a fairly short answer is that I’m not certain about how more rigorous payment for performance would work out. Where it’s been tried in the States there’s absolute disaster, because teachers work a lot long collegiality, and what you don’t want is people harbouring their resources away and not giving to their mates, because they want more money. You don’t want that to happen. So there are issues there which have got to be debated and worked through, it’s not as simple as that.

In the UK, the new Labour Government, which is interesting for a Labour Government, have brought in a very, very tough performance pay. Initially it was pay by results. It’s changed a little bit now, and they’ve mellowed on that a wee bit, but it’s still ‘if you perform well in the classroom’, ‘if your kids are going well in tests and exams, relative to their ability’, then you can apply for a £2000 increase. Then you’ve got to be appraised and see whether or not it’s justified.

So, that’s a little bit of a different way of doing it. We’ve gone softly, softly way here in New Zealand. Whether it’ll be hardened up, I don’t know. It won’t under a Labour Government; it might be under a centre-right.

In the form of a conclusion, what would you see as the greatest challenge facing Auckland Grammar and yourself within the next few years?

I think that probably one of the challenges is to maintain our reputation as a centre of academic excellence, because as the school gets bigger, you’re invariably taking in a wider range of clienteles; and that’s happened over the last 10-15 years. The ability range was much narrower 15 years ago than it is now, and yet, over the years our exam results are probably better overall than they were then. And you’d like to think that’s because of better teaching, motivated students who want to do well, and so on, but it’s still going to be a challenge to retain that, particularly if they bring in this Achievement 2001 and we have to buy into it. Because there’s not doubt about that, that the idea is that everyone will become, well, not mediocre, but it will certainly level things out. And that’s been a traditional Labour policy, which is unfortunate in a way for New Zealand. We’re sort of going back 30 years to the 1960’s when you could go to your local school and know that you’re going to get as good an education as if you went to Auckland Grammar. Because it was a different society then, it was a lot more egalitarian in every way. But things have changed so much, and I think that unfortunately Labour party policy is probably not up-to-speed with that. When I spoke to Trevor Mallard, I’d certainly been over to England and had a look at what’s happening in the UK with the New Labour government, and he said he had, and he admired all the stuff they were doing, but it’s not necessarily the policy of the Labour Party over here.

So, the challenge is to retain our academic rigour, to retain our academic leadership as a state school, and over private schools as well, and I think one of the real big challenges is in boys’ education. Boys are failing at a rate so much greater than girls, it’s a surreal crisis, not just here, but also in the UK and USA. We have to be a role model and show that boys can achieve, and that’s a massive challenge for us.

I think that the other challenge involves quality staffing. People are not being attracted into teaching services; I can’t remember the last time a Grammar boy decided to go teaching. In my time here, we’ve wooed back Mr Yeh, who’s a Grammar Old Boy and he’s doing a fantastic job in the Japanese department. He’s a Grammar Boy, I’m hoping to get another Grammar Boy next year coming back in Classics and French and Latin. But not that many of the good calibre academic students, who always used to go to teaching, are going to teaching now. And so young, male, talented teachers with enthusiasm and innovation and who want to teach with a passion for their subject, I just don’t see them. And you probably notice a lot of the training college students that we have are older people, who’ve been through various jobs and decided to go teaching. And they may be very good, but at the end of the day, you have to have a balance on your staff between those experienced people who have got a huge amount to contribute, and the younger, lively, energetic people coming in all the time. That’s another big challenge.

Also, I think that the challenge of technology is something we’ve got to face up to. We have to be able to provide our teachers and our boys with good service for that, because there’s no doubt that you’re going to have an increasing globalisation of education just as you are in everything else. You can get degrees on the internet now, they’re probably rubbish, but you can still do it, and when you think about education, should we be providing qualifications to you that are globally marketable so that when you leave you have got something that is marketable overseas? There are real challenges there.

In the sporting side, the major challenge is schools setting up academies in every sport - is that our business? Should schools set up Under 17 Soccer academies like Mount Albert Grammar, or bring in Rugby imports all the time like Kings? I’ve always gone against that as not being part of what we’re about. But unfortunately, schools are judged by all sorts of criteria these days: academic, sports, music, and cultural, the whole thing, so you have to continue to provide a high quality education in all those areas, and how we do it is a real challenge. Next year we’ve forming a sports programme that won’t take kids out of class. They’ll offer opportunities at lunchtime and after school, before school or the holidays for elite players to get extra coaching and so on. And that’s one way that we can look after our good sports players better.

There’s a whole host of issues. Property: we’re hoping to be one of the 40 trial schools that Nick Smith mentioned on Friday that can mange their own public budget. They’re going to select 40 schools, and we want to do that. We want to run our own school. We don’t want to be told from Wellington, "Well, you can divide that room into two". I go cap in hand and waste so much of my time begging and pleading to do things that I should just be able to do. Because we’re not a stupid school, we plan things, we know what we’re doing, we’ve got a vision, we’ve got a property plan for the next 10 years of what we’d like to do. And so we’re hopeful of being part of one of those 40 schools, and I’ve already done a bit of lobbying in a meeting last week of the holidays with people in the Ministry saying that we want to be part of that. Now, we can’t dictate, but we do want to be part of that and to make those decisions ourselves, and we should know on Friday, I hope, whether we’ve been accepted into that programme.

So, there are lots of things like that that are sort of exciting in this school because things are always changing. There are some schools where the same thing goes on everyday, same everyday, every year because they haven’t got the privileged position that we have of having a bit of good support and having lots of neat ideas that we want to do.