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Over the last week, David Seymour has been hitting the media announcing a new group of charter schools. I discussed three of these in my previous article so now let’s turn our attention to the fourth one. You will find that, typically, Seymour has been ‘economical with the truth’, in other word just making stuff up to gain the headlines and depending on the inability/unwillingness of the media to cast a critical eye over his pronouncements. Fortunately we can rely on the various highly skilled and knowledgeable people behind the Aotearoa Educators Collective to reveal the actual situation. “On 20 October, the Associate Minister of Education, and charter schooling circus ringmaster, Hon David Seymour, announced his approval of what he called New Zealand’s ‘first sports school’, the New Zealand Performance Academy Aotearoa (NZPAA), to commence in 2026, in Upper Hutt.” As you’d expect with most things that Seymour says, he is either ignorant or deliberately misleading. Take your pick. “Not to split hairs, Mr Seymour but, in fact, a specialist sports school, Manakura (originally named Tū Toa), began in Palmerston North in 2005. Established through a Māori education charitable trust, it became a Y9-Y13 designated character state school in 2015. In 2024, it moved to a purpose-built campus funded by a $20 million government grant, on land donated by Massey University.” Mr Seymour claimed, nonetheless, that NZPAA was evidence that “the charter school model can be different if we let communities bring their ideas to the table” ‘Associate Minister Seymour’s Beehive release also waxed lyrical about the educational benefits for the Year 11-13 students who will attend: “The school will serve students with serious sporting aspirations, giving them the skills to ignite a professional career, while ensuring they get the academic education all students need…. Students will no longer have to sacrifice their education in pursuit of sporting dreams, or vice versa”’. Sounds good, Mr Seymour. However let’s have a little look at the Manukura School website On their “About” page, we find the following information. “Our Vision “If we continue to teach as we did yesterday, we rob our children of their tomorrow.” “He rangi tā matawhāiti, he rangi tā matawhānui.” The balance of face to face and self directed online learning with the support of passionate curriculum leaders, supervisors and tutors is now a proven formula for academic excellence. MANUKURA has evolved a student centred education system over the past fifteen years that has achieved outstanding academic results. Each student is nurtured in their academic learning programme to ensure successful outcomes are achieved. A culture of excellence is an expected way of operating at MANUKURA. Furthermore, MANUKURA is committed to an educational programme that promotes learners to think beyond themself and today. Tailored Learning “He matenga poto, he oranga roa.” All students have individualised plans that reflect their broad passions, aspirations and needs. These plans assist in maintaining a positive blend between students’ academics, interests and sporting career pathways. Students individual plans are reviewed regularly to ensure they are “living documents” focused on each students’ short, medium and long term outcomes. Whānau Centered “Kaua mā te waha pakarū, waiho mā te upoko pakarū.” Whanau engagement and involvement is critical in the MANUKURA model, the student and their whānau link to ensure holistic development is achieved with the student centered in the decision making process. We welcome all enquiries, please get in touch with us today by any of the communication links at the bottom of the page.” All of this completely destroys all the claims Seymour has made about his new charter school, and proves that innovative schooling can be provided within the current education system. The AEC article continues: “Our first Secondary School Sports Academy (SSSA) opened in 1997 at Aranui in Christchurch. Many others soon followed. By 2019 there were 93 SSSAs (or roughly one in every four secondary schools). In 2025, there could well be more. In 2019, researchers at Auckland University of Technology reported that these academies serve primarily as marketing tools.” So do these academies serve the children’s best interests, or the schools? But wait, there’s more. “Mr Seymour’s story is not quite the same story told by NZPPA board member Brett O’Riley when interviewed by Mike Hosking the next morning about what Hosking described as a ‘dream come true’ opportunity for sports lovers. O’Riley enthusiastically recounted the phone ‘running hot’ with enquiries from the Hutt Valley catchment and across the Wellington region (presumably a fair number of these are from students currently at other secondary schools that have invested heavily in developing SSSAs and high-performance sports programmes, and who face the very real prospect of having their top performers creamed/poached by NZPAA).” And there’s yet more: ‘Hosking inconveniently asked about the mismatch between establishing a high performance, elite athlete school, and the rules of the scheme that say all charter schools are obliged to take anyone who wants to enrol (i.e. elite, not quite elite, passionate but ordinary, or just sports-curious). “MH: How does it work? Do you pick winners? Are you cherry picking…? BO: No, our funding that comes through the charter school programme really establishes us as a school that takes all comers, anyone who is interested in going to the [NZPAA] and they can participate in the school alongside people who are part of the Wellington Phoenix Academy…. MH: Surely, if you’ve got a facility, you want to plug in the best athletes where they can excel to the point where they will live to their fullest potential. Isn’t that what that’s all about?”’ The AEC article then unpicks what this means in practice. “So at least two bloopers from Mr O’Riley. First, he revealed that the school will effectively have A and B streams. A for the top jocks, and B for the sports fans. And second, he let slip that a major purpose of the school is to provide academic pathway support for the Wellington Phoenix Football Academy.” Oh and who is behind the Wellington Phoenix Football Academy, and this new charter school? “The General Manager of Wellington Phoenix, and a founder member of the NZPAA board, is David Dome. Dome is reportedly one of the ‘visionaries’ behind the charter school. He hopes that its establishment will allow Wellington Phoenix to double the number of children in its Academy to 36, all of whom are boarders.” So what’s the story here, Mr Seymour? Feeding more tax payer money to corporates mates again? “The other issue of course, is cui bono? Or who benefits when corporate business interests are allowed to profit from state-funded schooling? Mr Seymour implied that the community (i.e. ordinary kiwis) came up with this idea. That’s a porkie in my view because he omitted to tell us that the new charter school appears, on the publicly available evidence at least, to be the result of a mutually beneficial commercial opportunity snapped up by Wellington Phoenix (i.e. Welnix GP Limited), the Wellington Phoenix Football Academy Limited, and the New Zealand Campus of Innovation and Sport (NZCIS), another private limited company. NZCIS has been jointly owned since 2016 by two well-known, large scale commercial property and residential subdivision developers based in Upper Hutt, Malcolm Gillies and Kevin Melville.” The article goes into NZCIS in some depth, and I recommend you read it. And there’s a very big BUT: “Let’s wind back a bit. Is the idea a good one as its proponents and cheerleaders claim? The research evidence does not paint such a rosy picture of the effects of sports specialisation for elite young athletes or their families.” In particular: “Sport specialization often requires increased training hours and may predispose young athletes to social isolation, poor academic performance, increased anxiety, greater stress, inadequate sleep, decreased family time, and burnout.” There is so much more in the AEC article, especially about the financial aspects and profit seeking of the charter school’s owners. I’ve only highlighted sections and again I recommend you read it. “Let’s just imagine for a moment that the owners of three entities are only very well off, or modest multi-millionaires, rather than billionaires. Even so, is it too much to ask them to act like genuine philanthropists and at the very least match the funding they will receive from the taxpayer for establishing and running their private school?” Yeah, right. Seymour is playing us for fools and winning.
