Cutting hair, not classes

When a Rotorua school found students wanted to cut school in order to cut hair, it came up with a novel response. WAYNE ERB reports on a successful attempt to keep girls at school

Cutting, dyeing and blow-drying hair may be the dream for many young teenage girls, but Rotorua Girls High School says they need not skip class in order to experience it.

Five years ago, the school had a run of girls seeking early leaving exemptions to study hairdressing and refusing to learn anything else.

Principal Annette Joyce realised that something needed to be done to engage the students and keep them coming to class.

"I was concerned at the number of students who had received early exemptions to do hairdressing. These tended to be girls at Year 10 level and the common pattern seemed to be they had effectively become school refusers."

These students would remain at home for weeks if need be as they insisted to family and school that the only outcome they would accept was to leave school and enrol in a hairdressing course.

"They weren't attending school and they were working on their parents and saying that all they wanted to do was hairdressing. So mum would come in and ask for an exemption."

Annette had visited a school in Japan that had its own hairdressing class and decided the same could work for Rotorua Girls.

The school went ahead and now has hairdressing as an option at Years 10 and 11. Tutors are brought in from Waiariki Institute of Technology and students attend a block course at the institute in the final weeks of the year to complete assessments.

One outcome has been a big drop in the number of early leaving exemptions, Annette says. In large part that is because the in-house hairdressing course takes away one excuse for leaving school, she explains.

She remembers a case in which a girl and her mother expressed anger when an early leave exemption had been denied. After discussions, they agreed the student would be taken on in the hairdressing class for a trial period if she promised to attend school. She kept that promise and her level of engagement rose to the extent that she stayed on to complete Year 13.

"The interesting thing was her mother came back to speak to me. She was delighted with the outcome for her daughter and said how remarkable it was. She had never wanted her daughter to leave early but things had got so bad back at home that she felt she had to support the application [for early leaving]."

The fact that the girl had to make a promise to turn up was not accidental. Annette says all girls accepted into the hairdressing course, and there are only 16 places at Year 10, have to meet regular attendance standards.

That teaches them responsibility at an early age. To make sure such lessons are targeted for maximum effect, staff select those applicants for the hairdressing course they believe might be at risk of leaving early.

The course is not the only attempt to keep students at school. Legal studies, Mâori performance, adventure tourism and retail are among other courses the school has introduced in response to student and parent feedback from surveys and focus groups.

The range of options and flexibility with timetables mean the school can develop individual study programmes for senior students, but only after they have tried the whole subject range.

Annette says Year 9 students have undertaken for the past five years a compulsory programme with no options but which, on top of the core subjects, includes rotation through five aspects of the arts, languages, business and technology modules.

"It gives them exposure to the whole range of possibilities in the senior school. The students are enthusiastic about the programme and we now feel sure that it is very successful."