Kerre Woodham: What's the point in keeping intermediate schools?

Kerre Woodham Mornings Podcast

One of the emails that did come in for the Prime Minister caught my eye, and I thought, you know, this is not a silly idea. It might be. I think there's some merit and discussing it and I'd love to run it by you.

It was from the Elephant Beetle Think Tank and a quick Google found that no such thing exists, probably a couple of people enjoying a glass of wine and having chats, but none the less... it questions why we still have intermediate schools. There are 116 intermediate schools that remain within the education system, and according to the Elephant Beetle Intermediate School plan, there would be huge cost savings without the fixed costs of operating intermediates, which can be diverted into the remaining school system.

The operating budget for running the network of intermediates is big and there are massive savings to be had, potentially. The savings could be diverted into providing better outcomes in education, perhaps paying teachers more. Then take the land that the intermediate schools are on, which is generally in prime position in the middle of communities, in the middle of cities, in the middle of towns, and convert them into housing developments with 30% or so of the residences reserved for service workers like police, teachers, and nurses at subsidised prices and with better mortgage interest rates. As intermediate schools typically sit in the middle of established residential areas, there is little issue or a big strain on creating the infrastructure to do this. Create a mix of high and low rise housing, utilising the existing school halls etcetera as community centres and thereby creating a new utopia.

Now obviously it's going to be more difficult than that, more expensive than that, but it's not a bad idea because what purpose do intermediate schools have? My daughter went to Ponsonby Intermediate and it was a very, very good school, but if the same teachers had been either at extended primary schools or at extended colleges... it was the people who made the education, it wasn't the fact that it was an intermediate school.

You look back at the history of intermediate schools and they've been neither fish nor fowl. They were set up in 1922, initially to act as a kind of sorting gate to steer kids either into the trades or into academic courses. That's why you did the cooking and the metal work at intermediate. A study done on intermediates, ‘The New Zealand Intermediate School Experiment - Caught Between Two Schools’ was done by the Waikato Journal of Education and they said directors and Ministers of Education were unable to provide guidance for intermediate schools, thus, they found neither a clear nor consistent philosophy to justify their existence. Consequently, intermediate schools were left to develop in their own ways, in the hope that a role could somehow be found for them.

When there was a review of the development and progress of New Zealand Intermediate schools in 1938, the author of the report said the cause for surprise is not that the schools should have lagged along the road, but that they should have gone so far since no one has ever known quite what they were doing. And the authors of the Waikato Journal Report say nearly 60 years later, the intermediates are still no closer to discovering and developing a clear educational philosophy and identity.

And you would have to wonder, what is the point of them? You could easily, I would have thought, even with the pressure on school buildings, amalgamate them into either primary or secondary schools. And a lot of campuses are year 7 through to 13, and then you have all of that space freed up to do with as you wish, and all of that money freed up to do with as you wish. Now, presumably there are ideas against this, and I'd like to hear them because so far I've just heard the idea for and it doesn't sound like a bad one. But if the reason to keep them is just because they've always been there since 1922, I don't think that's a good enough reason.

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