Waipareira Drops Alternative Education

Pānui | Media Statement

Waipareira Drops Alternative Education

Thursday, 24th November 2016

Te Whanau o Waipareira has dropped its Alternative Education Contract with the Ministry of Education and will transition youth on its books to other west Auckland providers.

Waipareira Youth Services Practice Leader Donovan Busby said this decision to pull out of the Alternative Education contract was not made lightly. Waipareira has been delivering an Alternative Education programme since 1990.

“But because Amokura – our Alternative Education Programme - was a risk to the organisation and the rangatahi, we could not continue,” Donovan said.

He said those risks had emerged over the past few years.

“In a class of 14, we would have had 1-2 ‘high offending, high risk youth’ and we were able to wrap other services around to mitigate any behavioural issues that might arise within the cohort and to stop the influence those youth would have over others. But in the past two years, we have had a big increase of ‘high risk’ youth and found it hard for the tutors to manage. We had to drag other staff from their services to basically baby sit these rangatahi,” Donovan said.

He also dispelled rumours that Waipareira had lost its contract. All youth will be transferred by the end of this school year.

“The Ministry of Education is not resourcing this programme properly and are setting up the Alternative Education system to fail,” Donovan said.

“As most campuses don’t have the scale of state run schools, the programme is running at a loss.”

“We chose not to renew our contract.”

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