Sunday thoughts: What do you get when you send two British edu policy consultants to New Zealand?
Myself and my colleague Jess Lister are currently midway through a project in New Zealand, where we are here for a couple of weeks to do some fieldwork for a really interesting project for the University of Canterbury (UC) in Christchurch, ahead of their 150th anniversary next year. We’ve been asked to come both to bring some of the methodology we’ve developed in the UK to look at universities’ social and cultural impact, and because UC, like Christchurch itself, has a lot of links to the UK — unsurprisingly, given the city’s name, it was formed by colonial settlers and alumni from the old country to be the Oxford of the Southern Hemisphere, and the city and university have lots of links to Oxford and Cambridge as well as other UK cities. (There’s a Durham Street that leads just off Cambridge Terrace in the central business district, and I suppose the former is where the businesses go who never wanted to be based in the latter location anyway)
To give some context, UC itself is a medium sized university by UK standards, with around 16k FTE students, and a turnover of around £200m in the equivalent in NZ$. It sits just to the west of the city centre of Christchurch, which is the second largest city in New Zealand but which has a population of around 400,000, which would make it around the tenth to the twelfth biggest city in the UK. The most seminal recent moment in the city was the earthquake in 2011, which caused widespread damage and still casts an immense shadow over the city, psychologically. The university and much of the city were substantially rebuilt — the former at a cost of just over $1.2bn NZ$ or around £600m. This means that, unsurprisingly, a lot of facilities are new. More recently, the almost total shutdown of New Zealand during covid has meant that international students almost totally disappeared for three academic years, and are now just starting to return (the borders have only been reopened since summer 2022).
Based on nothing more than a couple of weeks of research and observations and a lot of discussions with university and community leaders, I thought I’d share a few reflections on commonalities and differences between the English school and university systems and their New Zealand counterparts. I stress this should be taken as nothing more than immediate impressions!
1. A fine grained understanding of household income and its use in school funding and university recruitment. The NZ system for school funding works by every school being divided into ten groups by the proportion of low income students they have on roll, and school funding is directly allocated by that decile. That leads to an incredibly fine grained funding system where a school in the 4th or 5th decile will get different amounts to the 3rd and 6th decile, even on very small differences of pupil populations. And unlike pupil premium, this is the whole core school funding model which varies by decile. It’s an unpopular system which is being phased out next year, but at the moment it reigns supreme, and it feeds into other areas of public policy. Every parent we spoke to in focus groups knew exactly what decile their school was in. Compare that teachers in the UK, who would proably be able to guess roughly what proportion of pupil premium students they have, but a figure that would be almost totally unknown to almost all parents. The decile system is also used in university recruitment, where scholarships, outreach activity and measurements of recruitment and retention are all measured by school deciles that the students came from (but not household decile or income). It leads to some fine grained analysis and the potential for very nuanced targeting, but I suspect of lot of agonizing goes on over very small and probably indistinguishable differences.
2. Disadvantage in education. A focus on income also sometimes cuts slightly awkwardly across efforts to support attainment and access among Maori and Pasifika young people — and where the efforts by New Zealand to tackle indigenous people’s educational barriers is part of a much bigger economic, social and political movement for dealing with the colonial history of the country which has gathered pace over the last ten years and which frames everything that the country does. There is nothing even approaching this type of widespread national debate about the country’s history in the UK, and it’s interesting to observe (but also replete with potential pitfalls for Brits — we’re working closely with some experts to make sure we understand the issues).
3. A local, and a global, approach among young people. There are only 8 universities in NZ (across a total population of just over 5m, so less proportionately in the UK). A much higher proportion of NZ students will attend their local university, even though there’s quite a spread of academic performance and research strengths. Universities are loath, it seems, to compete with each other in the same way (though a rival university, Otago, has a big medical school slap bang in the middle of Christchurch, and heavily brands it, which is….interesting). Relatively few students we spoke to considered going abroad for study. But the concept of travel and work abroad for a year or more — normally in a person’s 20s — is a deeply felt rite of passage among students and families (though more among higher decile families). Almost everyone we spoke to had either spent a year or so working in the UK or US, or was considering it, or wanted to. The NZ diaspora is very culturally strong.
4. Student Volunteer Army and service learning. As mentioned above, the Christchurch earthquake was a seminal event in the city and still affects almost every aspect of life here, a decade on. One of the most well remembered and spontaneous things that happened in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake was the formation of what was called the Student Volunteer Army, made up of 11,000 UC students, who went and cleared wreckage and generally volunteered with clean up. A decade on, when you ask people in Christchurch what they know about the university, the first thing that a good ¾ of people will say is the SVA. The founder, Sam Johnson, is a national and internationally recognized social entrepreneur, and the SVA still exists as a broader volunteer infrastruture, closely linked to the university. This culture of community activism and service learning is also strongly felt more widely through the student population. There’s a popular first year course, Christchurch 101, which teaches social volunteering and service learning and is based on the experience of the SVA, and there’s now an entire BA based around the concept of youth and community leadership.
5. I don’t like HE, I love it. Look, maybe it’s just our British cynicism. But in all the qual and quant we’ve done, speaking to a huge number of people across the city, inside the university and out, almost no one has a bad word to say about the University or its impact in the city. When we get to the bit in our discussion guides that asks about downsides, and we prompt — do students put housing pressure on the city? Is there anti social behaviour? we’re met with shrugs and grins. I’d love to know how much this is just Kiwi optimism and how much it represents a university that is truly embedded in its community, but I have to be honest, it’s disconcerting being this happy.
6. Cross curricular focus in many courses. The university is divided up into fairly traditional faculties covering business, humanities, engineering, law, social sciences and so on. But the university has worked hard to embed a number of common cross cutting themes across each of these. Almost all courses — certainly the relevant ones — have a period of work enabled learning in them via placements. There’s a strong focus on sustainability, which is very prominent here in New Zealand. There’s also a strong focus on resilience, which is both cross cutting, and faculty specific — by which I mean there’s a lot of discussion about responding to natural disasters and supporting resilient economies and societies (of which courses like engineering obviously take the lead but it’s in every faculty), but there’s also a clear focus on educating graduates in a broader sense of resilience. What this means is that almost all the courses are very New Zealand specific, and some are very Christchurch specific. These are not curricula you could just transplant and teach in the US or UK. I don’t know whether this is a good thing or a bad thing, but it’s an interesting observation.
7. Location, location, location. Originally (in the 1870s), the university was right in the city centre — indeed, the colonial settlers built the university, some other civic buildings, and then the city around it. But around the time of their centenary, the growing university decided to decant out of the traditional neo Gothic Oxbridge college style buildings in the centre and move almost entirely to a new campus, around 5km to the west of the city. This move still bitterly divides the city and the university community to this day. Can the university now credibly be said to be in the city? Is it too far away? Should some faculties move back into the original buildings? Why don’t students travel between the two? Does it matter that there’s an enclave of student-town now to the west? Are the original buildings being used properly, or should the business school move into it? Isn’t it much better to now have space and facilities in a beautiful greenfield campus with proper space for housing? I can’t but help but ponder — what would happen if Oxford or Cambridge had taken the decision fifty years or so ago to decant from their ancient city centres, where they were already hemmed in by planning laws, lack of transport and infrastructure, and properly built new campuses on the outskirts of the city, in the way that Cambridge in particular is doing now but alongside its historic centre? Would we have a hollowed out pair of cities and universities slightly dislocated from their historic homes, or would we have more practical world class facilities for world class universities? My romantic historian heart says one thing. My rational STEM loving head says another. I’m torn, but it’s a fascinating idle thought experiment.
8. A complicated school system. We’ve visited or looked at a handful of schools across Christchurch while we’ve been here. The system across the city is quite baffling, and that’s saying something coming from the English system. There’s 145 schools in the city. Most of them are primary (Y1–6) and then secondary (Y7-Y13). So far, so simple. But then in some parts of the city — under the same Ministry of Education — there’s also middle schools. And sixth form standalones. Then there’s also three types of funding structure. Most schools are state schools, funded by the government. There’s a handful of independent schools, educating a similar 8%ish of pupils (and which include a couple very prestigious schools that have been built as deliberate physical homages to places like Winchester and Magdalen College School). But there’s a third category covering about 15% of the population called state integrated schools, which are former private schools (many of them Catholic) now integrated into the state sector. But unlike grant maintained schools in England, these hybrid schools can still charge a (hefty) fee for international students. The difference in size of schools is also striking. There are 5 primary schools in the city region with fewer than 100 pupils and 16 fewer than 200. And at the same time, we visited one school, the biggest in New Zealand, which takes pupils from Y9 to Y13 only, and has over 2,400 students. In five school years. At its peak, it had a twenty five form entry. It runs a fairly well recognized school within school model of three Y9 to Y12 schools and a Y13 standalone institution, and it feels very manageable when you walk round it. But twenty five form entry……
The most depressing observation has been the extent to which the UKs current travails are well understood. A parent focus group diverted itself for five minutes last week to discuss why everything in the UK, from housing to energy, is so expensive. An Uber driver chatted happily about “Boris Johnson? No, no, no, the other one, the lady….all went wrong?” I’ve also had to bluff that I know a lot more about the England rugby union team than I do, and have perfected my “mmm, yeah” as people discuss the strengths of Eddie Jones’ men against the All Blacks. But in truth, it’s been nothing but enjoyable and thought provoking sharing some of the lessons that the UK sector has gone through around civic and community engagement in the last few years, and what that might mean for NZ, and indeed vice versa.
