Background of students in Alternative Education: Interviews with a selected 2008 cohort

9. Conclusions

The story underneath the ‘stories’

Ninety-three percent of the AE students we interviewed had not experienced successful learning in their secondary schools and yet 80 percent had found primary schooling to be conducive to successful learning. There is no doubt that many of these students were troubled young people, with home and whänau contexts likely to impede their learning, but it is salutary to hear them describe the ways in which the different sectors supported or failed to support them, regardless of their backgrounds. In their views primary schools in the main had provided enough scaffolding to support their educational progress. They indentified a number of factors that had allowed them to learn alongside their peers: a protected environment; one-to-one learning situation;, positive relationships with teachers; safe boundaries with consistent routines; caring and nurturing assistance where it was needed; a range of educational interventions; and appropriate learning levels with attainable next learning steps and guided teaching to reach those steps. Secondary schooling, in their eyes appeared to have provided few of these factors.

As a result, almost 100 percent of these students disengaged once they had started secondary school, some for as long as a year before they were picked up and sent to their AE centres. This disengagement preceded their lack of presence in secondary schools (extended truancy) and confirms what the international literature has found i.e. that an engagement gap (Yazzie-Mintz, 2006) occurs before the oft-cited achievement gap.

In spite of this disengagement, all of the students were enjoying AE, and 95 percent were re-engaged in learning. They were experiencing effective relationships with teachers in AE and were working at more appropriate levels for learning to become successful again. Some needed more extended learning than their AE centres were able to provide, and we identify a resourcing problem with AE as it presently stands. From our findings we think it unlikely that many of these students could be successfully reintegrated into secondary schools as they presently are organised and resourced. There appears to be little or no resourcing to assist these students to return to mainstream settings, and very little will or expectation that they are entitled to the regular New Zealand curriculum.

It needs to be remembered that we studied a very small group of students from the entire secondary school sector in this research, but our findings resonate with other research about secondary school students in New Zealand, and the need for serious re-thinking of secondary education. Russell Bishop’s Te Kötahitanga project emphasises the need for better relationships between teachers and Maori students before their achievement levels will rise, and Jane Gilbert’s (2005) research argues the need for a change in learning and curriculum to better meet the needs of the vast majority of secondary students for the 21st Century. Building on this treatise, Bolstad and Gilbert (2008) in a more recent book, argue that present day secondary school assessment needs to be rethought to make these changes possible. All of our projects come to the same conclusion—that secondary education is not meeting the needs of all of today’s secondary school students.

The differences in our findings are the issues we see contributing to this. We argue that there are two main issues contributing to why this is the case—relational (teachers not engaging with these students effectively) and organisational (school systems level failures). Bishop’s research argues the former point, while Gilbert and Bolstad’s research argues the latter –organisational issues around assessment are driving the present system. We argue that secondary schools need to be re-thought to ensure initial engagement for all learners, not just the ones who fit into the system. Gilbert and Bolstad argue that organisational issues (assessment and outcomes) at the other end of the system are the problem. Most researchers concur with the proposition that changes need to occur for all students to experience successful school outcomes.

Our study, it needs to be remembered, is a very small sample of one extreme end of the continuum of all secondary school learners, so we cannot make general statements about our findings. However, our findings taken in conjunction with the above studies, bring to light the most dysfunctional aspects of the present system at this end of the continuum—those in the ‘tail’ where there are too many young people who are failing to achieve. We would hazard a guess that there are significant numbers of other secondary students on this continuum whom the system is failing to serve.