Kohanga Reo meets Primary School

Tu Tangata, Issue 19, 1 August 1984, Page 7

Kohanga Reo meets Primary School

At three years old, Henare spoke english. Then the Waiwhetu maori language nursery kohanga reo opened in Wellington. At five he was bilingual, conversing easily in both languages. Then he went to school. Now he speaks english all day and is losing his maori. His mother is heartbroken. The school is sympathetic and supportive. It says it is doing all it can with the resources available. Maori parents say that is not enough. They want a minimum of one to three hours oral maori a day. If they do not get it they will keep their children out of school and teach them themselves. The Education Department has consistently maintained that primary schools can cater for kohanga reo graduates. But primary teachers and maori leaders say they cannot. With about 3000 bilingual babies in kohanga reo throughout NZ the debate is only just beginning. Juliet Ashton went to Waiwhetu kohanga reo to find out how its parents and the local school are facing the future.

Principal sympathises with parents’ views Waiwhetu school principal lan Grenfell is sympathetic to the views of the kohanga reo parents.

But he says his school is already doing all it can with the resources available to cater for the kohanga reo graduates. About one-fifth of the school’s more than 200 pupils are maori. Mr Grenfell says the Education Board gave special consideration to an application for an itinerant teacher of maori who now visits the school each Wednesday morning. ‘The demand for her is very great,’ he said. ‘We’re privileged to have her. The board has been very supportive.’ Mr Grenfell said one of his senior teachers had been developing maori programmes for pupils on her own time as well as attending the six-week maori language intensive course at Wellington Polytechnic. She was selected for the national conference on incorporating language nursery children into schools. Full consideration had been given to the possibility raised by maori education director Willie Kaa, of using the teacher aid scheme to bring fluent maori speakers into schools to work with kohanga reo graduates. But allocations of teacher aid hours changed each year. Mr Grenfell said his school was entitled to 7 V. 2 hours, but next year it could be none. The aid employed this year was used to fill in gaps in other programmes where a need was seen.

TE KOHANGA REO

He would welcome extra teacher aid hours and maori language would be a high priority. Mr Kaa suggested the teacher aid system, used extensively for reading recovery and language development programmes, could be used to bolster maori language in schools. Aids do not have to be trained teachers. He said it was already used for extra help in bilingual schools on the East Coast. But only a certain number of discretionary hours could be applied for through the district senior inspector, and large schools could have other priorities apart from maori language. Mr Kaa said there was nothing in law to stop schools spending several hours a day using maori language as the medium of instruction. “That is education department policy,” he said. The primary system had a lot of flexibility and many things were negotiable at the classroom level.