Hagley High’s future

Press, 31 May 1982, Page 16

Hagley High’s future

The air of uncertainty surrounding the future of Hagley High School may be dispelled within a week or two by the release of a report, prepared by a working party of the Christchurch Secondary Schools’ Council, on secondary school rolls in Christchurch. The report has been submitted to, and is being considered by, the. Minister of Education.

The salient point of this report is understood to be that there are too many secondary school places in Christchurch for the number of pupils offering themselves. Since Hagley’s roll has declined, and its buildings will eventually need strengthening or replacement, its closing is obviously one way to reduce the number of places available to the number of places, needed. That might have been the end of . the matter, had Hagley'High not created for itself a special place in education in Christchurch. It is the only school which mixes, in any numbers, both “ordinary,” adolescent, secondary school pupils and adults taking , a “second chance” at acquiring educational qualifications in ordinary school hours.

The suggestion has been floated that Hagley should be maintained as a community education centre, surrendering its secondary pupils to other schools. If the school is shorn in this way, however, it will lose its special, and valuable, character and also tend to overlap, or even come into competition, with the Polytechnic. Hagley’s unique mix of adolescent and adult pupils and the manner , in which it affords adults

■ an opportunity to return to school to make good deficiencies in their own educations, when they were young, are' worth preserving. The city’s “loss” of adolescent secondary pupils should, if at all possible, be spread among all existing high schools so that Hagley can survive and variety within the city’s secondary system be maintained. It will leave a particularly sour taste if Hagley is “sacrificed” primarily to allow the rebuilding of Christchurch Girls’ High School to proceed at the size planned some years ago before the over-all drop in secondary pupil numbers became apparent. The Minister of Education may well be “holding his fire”, about Hagley to give the public a chance to express their views. Certainly, this is not a matter on which the public should be presented suddenly with a definite and irrevocable decision. The matter needs wide discussion in the community and the first step ■ towards promoting such discussion would be the release, before any final decision about Hagley High is made, of the report about secondary school accommodation in Christchurch and of information about the (Treasury’s attitude towards rebuilding the Girls’ High School. If the axe is to fall on Hagley it must be . only because to maintain the school as it is would be to fly in the face of social and educational as well as an economic sense. The Minister, and anyone else, may find it very hard to make a case that this is so, given the place Hagley High has established for itself in Christchurch.