Limehills School and Dairying Families

Children of frequently moving farming families tend to fall behind at school, as gaps appear in their learning and social development. Schools are often not aware that new pupils are going to turn up and when they do, their records are often not accessible. DairyNZ along with school principals, has developed a database to stop children falling through the educational cracks, and have also provided funds to make it possible for schools to meet the special needs of itinerant children. Lime Hills School is a good example of a rural school that has made big efforts to involve immigrant families, viewing them as a learning resource and inviting them to their Global Café as a means of establishing good communication. 

Sharemilkers, herd managers, milk harvesters and others providing labour on farms, often change jobs and move from one locality to another. Their children have to change schools, a process that can be disruptive for the child and for the teachers and other students at both schools. In the dairy industry these changes happen most often around 1^st June – Gypsy Day – when sharemilkers and their herds relocate to new farms.

When they know that children are moving and where to, teachers from one school normally contact the other to share information about the children – their abilities and any learning or social difficulties. On an ad hoc basis that works okay, but when there is quite a big upheaval, particularly for a small country school that might be seeing 40% of its roll changing on one day, it can be very disruptive and a huge burden on staff. Sometimes children will disappear from one school and turn up at another with no warning.

Assessing the new children and seeing how they can best be accommodated within the school can be time consuming for school staff and it may take weeks to go through the necessary processes. It takes longer for the new children to settle in, get used to the school’s culture and routines, make friends and catch up with particular long term programmes that the school may be running.

The increase in dairy conversions over the past decade has caused dramatic changes in school populations, especially in regions like Southland and Canterbury where dairying has taken over large areas that have traditionally been sheep and beef or arable. The result is that children of many different ethnicities, some not speaking English at all, join school communities that were hitherto largely middle class Pakeha.

Lime Hills School about 40km north of Invercargill, a medium sized rural primary school with 188 pupils, has to deal with a turnover of 35 – 40% of its children every two years, and that doesn’t include leavers who go on to high school. Principal Jim Turrell says that such transience can be very disruptive.

“It can take children a long time to adjust to a new teacher and of course there are knock-on effects to the rest of the classroom in terms of systems and planning and organisation. Two new children changes the dynamics of a classroom completely. Teachers will be differentiating their classroom programmes to suit the abilities of the children and of course all that has to be rejigged, and sometimes there is a lag in getting those systems up and running again,” says Jim.

“It also takes time for new children themselves to get used to different routines and sometimes a new language. People may have the idea that primary schools are much of a muchness, but they can be incredibly different places. They can be quite unique with their own curriculum and their own ways of doing things, and kids can be caught up in that much more than you might think.”

“For example, we are an Enviro School and we work very hard with the children teaching a programme of sustainability ideas, but we have to keep reminding ourselves that there are a good number of children who haven’t heard many of the things included in the long-term programmes, and that takes constant revisiting and obviously has knock-on effects in terms of timetabling and coverage of different learning areas.”

Lime Hills School currently has about 20 pupils for whom English is a second language. Their countries of origin include the Philippines, Japan, Turkey, Argentina and the Pacific Islands, and some spoke very little English when they arrived.

Industry figures indicate that around 10% of dairying workers are immigrants and the industry is well aware that their lack of familiarity with local language and customs, along with the more general transience in farm labour, creates real headaches for schools. Andrew Fraser, brand marketing manager for DairyNZ, says that school principals were really negative about the industry when they first talked to them.

“We met with the Southland Rural Principals’ Association early last year and they described what was happening and what they were doing to deal with it. They were pleased to have us involved, and what came out of that meeting was that we needed to make an effort to communicate with the immigrant parents about what to do when changing schools,” says Andrew.

“We also came up with an online database so that when a child was about to leave one school, the teachers could use it to signal to the new school that the child was coming and share information about the child. The key to its success is that all schools should become involved – if there was only patchy use then it wouldn’t be worthwhile. This was achieved by the Ministry of Done, our teacher engagement team.”

Another DairyNZ initiative was to establish a contestable fund that schools could draw on to help teachers cope with the changes in school roll and to provide for children with learning challenges. This fund is administered by the local RTLB (the Ministry of Education’s Resource Teachers: Learning and Behaviour).

The database and the special fund pool have been used for the first time this winter and Jim Turrell says that the database is very helpful in that it gives schools a better idea of student movements.

“Sometimes we still get a surprise on June 1, but less so now because I think the industry has got better at including schools in those sorts of transitions. However, having that information is one thing, but then it’s a case of what do you do with it, and the other part of the DairyNZ support package was very helpful to those schools who were worst affected by transience around Gypsy Day,” he says.

“For example, one small school had quite a big influx of children, many of whom did not speak English and they needed time to be able to assess those kids properly for reading, maths etc, and find out what they knew and where the gaps were. The fund allowed the school to employ relief teachers to free the classroom teacher to find out that information promptly. Without the relief teachers the task would have been spread over weeks.”

“In another school an autistic child arrived and they didn’t have the expertise and experience available to deal with those needs. The fund provided money to enable professional development for the child’s classroom teacher. Again that is of huge benefit to the school and it probably would not have been available unless it was taken out of the school’s operational grant and so would have detracted from other programmes.”

Andrew Fraser is delighted with the progress made in Southland and the feedback DairyNZ has received.

“As an initiative it has been really successful in terms of helping teachers and demonstrating that we really do care about the situation. We are trying to make a difference and help make their life easier and I think it is appreciated,” he says.

“The first person who called on schools almost had to wear a flak jacket because they had such a cool reception, but 18 months later when she revisited 26 schools, at 24 of them she got hugs. Canterbury teachers have heard about the scheme and have enquired about having it in their area, so we are now looking to roll that pilot out into Canterbury where they have similar issues.”