College at fault, says arbitrator

Press, 18 March 1989, Page 12

College at fault, says arbitrator

PA Wellington The Ombudsman has criticised the way Wellington College applied its enrolments for 1989, after a complaint from parents whose sons were turned down.

After studying the way the boys were selected, the Ombudsman, Nadja Tollemache, said she could not be confident the scheme had been applied “fairly and consistently and that irrelevant considerations did not enter the board’s thinking.” But she said parents of unsuccessful candidates had few options of remedying the situation and the most likely one was for their sons to be admitted into the Fourth Form in 1990.

The parents of some of the boys from Karori who had been turned down, campaigned last year to get them accepted and complained to the Om-

budsman office about how the criteria was applied. They said a breakdown of successful candidates revealed 45 per cent came from areas which had their own State school nearby, and from which the college did not traditionally accept students.

The Ombudsman said the Wellington College Board of Governors had failed to make it clear to parents in the affected Karori area of the change in the enrolment scheme which came into affect in 1987.

The scheme limited the intake to 200 and did not include any in-zone pupils where boys were automatically accepted to the school as in the past.

The enrolment scheme had not caused any problems the previous year because all boys from the “old zone” were able to be admitted.