High school students working all night to support families

Some Auckland high school students are working 25-50 hours a week in paid jobs to help support their families.

Multiple students shared with 1News their stories of struggle and achievement while working overnight shifts and staying up late after work to finish assessments in time.

With New Zealand now officially in recession, there are concerns the situation could get worse still for many families.

“My family means the world to me so I just try and help,” said Tamaki College student, Soane. “The most I worked was 40 to 50 hours in a school week. I work to support my family with bills and groceries.”

Tamaki College student prefect Atareita added: “The most hours I’ve worked in a school week is 47. Because my parents are sick, it’s only me and my sister and my uncle working as our main source of income. I sometimes work night shift and it gets hard juggling with schoolwork but I just stay motivated to get all my work done.”

“I sometimes work 10pm to 6am,” said Tamaki College student Chris.

“I still come to school in the morning. I just go home and get changed then come here."

Sir Edmund Hillary Collegiate student Jaylin said: “I mainly work about 23 hours but the most I’ve worked is probably like 35-37 hours in a school week.

“I get home at around 11pm from work and then I normally go to sleep at around 1am, sometimes 2am or 3am from doing assessments after work.”

Jaylin’s best friend Nevaiah also works similar shifts. “I usually get changed here at school in the toilets into my work uniform and then go to work,” Nevaiah said.

“People don’t understand what we’re going through but we still manage to come to school and keep our attendance high.”

Many of their peers are also juggling long work hours while attending school. They are among the hardest working youth in the country and they’re doing it for family.

“The money I earn from working really helps my family, especially paying for like rent, our power, our water because it's really expensive nowadays,” Nevaiah said.

“My parents are still fulltime workers but whatever they've got left is not enough to pay our rent. So that's when I come in with the money that I've earned to just help them and to make sure that they're not alone on this. That they have someone that's supporting them in some way.

“What I earned from working in Christmas during the holidays I managed to buy my own uniform, my own stationery. Even my brother's uniform.

"My parents were just like, ‘this isn’t your job to provide for us, it’s [our] job to provide for me and my siblings'. But I can see when they’re struggling and I just wanted to take that away from them. They don't need to worry because I got it in the bag.”

Tamaki College principal Soana Pamaka said students have asked teachers for help to pay for expenses like electricity bills. She also said the school has stepped in to help pay students who needed to attend school but couldn’t afford to miss work.

“We got some money donated from our local community and we used that to negotiate with employers to release a young person for a day from work and we would pay them the equivalent of their wages if they’d been at work so they can still come to school,” Pamaka said.

It’s a temporary solution, she says, but it’s not sustainable.

“Teachers have paid power bills, they’ve paid for a device, shoes, a school uniform, stationery out of their own pockets.

“Our young people are very aware that they don’t want their family to be fakamā [embarrassed] so it’s always, ‘please don’t tell my mum but are you able to [help] because our power might get cut’.” said Pamaka.

“I don’t want people to listen to this and judge because the reason why we’re talking about this is to improve understanding of the reality of our young people. And we’re doing this with the utmost respect to our young people and their families.”

Sir Edmund Hillary Collegiate principal Kiri Turketo agrees. “We’re mindful of the stereotypes that are associated with brown people being in front of the camera saying ‘it’s tough’ but we are trying to shine a light on our reality with the deepest respect for our community because who is their voice?”

“

Our children are raw. They are fearless. They are honest. They're authentic. They're courageous, incredibly funny.

—  Principal Kiri Turketo |

As the cost of living continues to rise, Turketo says she and her staff anticipate things will get tougher for their students.

“You have to watch where the world is going. So we watch the OCR go up, as we watch inflation go up – then in your head you are back mapping what does that mean at ground level? And so we know that attendance may come down and the level of engagement may come down,” Turketo said.

She says many principals like herself and Pamaka are forced to find solutions so that their students are not left behind.

“We try not to be the barrier, we try not to punish these kids,” Turketo said.

“We have to be the hope. We have to say, OK, if you’re going to work maybe three days a week and come to school two days a week – does the attendance really matter to the people in Wellington?

“We will be working twice, three times as hard to give the student the same opportunity as any other student that would be at school five days a week. And I tell you what, that student will turn up every day on those two days that they come to school. They’ll come in a little bit tired but their biggest cheerleaders are their teachers.”

The scenario Turketo described is not hypothetical. 1News met one of Turketo’s Year 13 students who worked three days a week to help her family and could only attend school on Thursdays and Fridays.

That student told 1News she'd been able to keep up to date with her assessments for NCEA level 3 thanks to the support of several staff.

These are the stories New Zealand's record low-attendance rates don’t tell, say Turketo and Pamaka, and it's a reality often not understood by much of New Zealand society.

“The choice that [students] have in front of them is they need to work to support the income of the family. And our young people are very, very loyal to family. So if it comes down to the choice of school or work, they will work,” Pamaka said.

“It’s not a choice that any [student] should have to make but that’s what our young people have to make. So that’s when we, as the school have to support so that they can do both."

But doing both is tough, says Pamaka. It also means principals like her and Turketo, along with their staff, go above and beyond what the Ministry of Education requires.

Tamaki College runs Saturday classes throughout the year to help students catch up.

Both schools allow flexible learning so that students can learn from home on particular days.

Turketo concedes she and her staff can’t solve every problem and that’s a tough reality to live with.

“I had a student in Year 13 who was cleaning with her family. And one particular day, she had work at 7pm and finished at 7am which was the day of her level 3 English exam. And she turned up to her exam tired.

“Because she was tired her level of acuity and common sense wasn’t all there and she absentmindedly grabbed a piece of refill and in there was a paper that dropped off which was to remind her of something. Straight away she was pulled out and told she had cheated.

“In that split second, I don’t know – I guess if I was there and able to talk to the examination person I would’ve said ‘she hasn’t slept, the fact that she turned up to the exam is good enough'. And so this child had missed out on her external NCEA level 3 English exam. Now she works at Rainbow’s End. What did she really want to do? She wanted to do law.”

Turketo said she’s not suggesting that guidelines and rules should be shifted but that more understanding was needed around what their students face.

“We have to be really pragmatic, and you need a conglomerate of people around our students who can speak for them when they can’t speak for themselves.”

Turketo said resources from the Ministry of Education only go so far and that the systems working to address social inequity needed to work together better.

“It’s like we’re hustling for their education.

“I think the way New Zealand is structured is very siloed. The school should be working together with MSD, Ministry of Health, Housing so that we can all problem solve together to ensure that the child is succeeding in their learning."

While the Covid-19 pandemic highlighted pressures on some students forced to leave school to get jobs to help their families, Turketo and Pamaka say they are committed to keeping their students in school as long as possible.

“Our children are raw. They are fearless. They are honest. They're authentic. They're courageous, incredibly funny," Turketo said.

"And the honesty that they bring keeps me in this position to get up every morning to come to work.”

Pamaka agreed: “We have beautiful children. They're so smart, intelligent, full of capabilities and they love school. Not a single one of our students doesn't want to be successful. They all want to be successful.”

It’s words like these that keep students like Jaylin and Nevaiah coming back to school inspired to achieve.

“My future career is that I want to become an architect,” Nevaiah said.

“If I had a million dollars I would help my family pay off all our bills so they don’t have to feel stressed about it. With the rest I’ll probably buy a big house for me and my siblings to stay in so we can all have a room each.”

“I really want to become a doctor or like a radiologist,” says Jaylin, “To give back to my family or like people in the islands.”

“My family have always provided for me. Even when times were hard. They always kept a roof over my head, kept me warm, kept me fed. If I had a million dollars I would pay off my parents’ debt like Nevaiah said and I would give money to my grandparents especially. I’d get us a house that we can fit in and I would buy my dad a car.

“Yeah, I’d just give the money to my family.”

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