The headmaster of one of Auckland’s most prestigious schools says it uses private investigators and staff members to ensure students actually live in zone.
It comes as Auckland Grammar School is in the spotlight after it denied admission to a student who claimed to live in zone.
The boy’s mother lives outside the country, and his brother already attends the school, according to the NZ Herald. The two boys live with their grandfather who is reportedly in-zone.
Their parent is now protesting outside the school grounds, demanding her son be allowed to start classes.
The Ministry of Education has also stepped in, but Grammar is contesting their direction – saying its decision was in line with the Education and Training Act’s rules.
“The act is the act, and our understanding of the act is that those are the expectations,” headmaster Tim O’Connor told Breakfast this morning, while not speaking directly about the case currently in the headlines.
“And we need to apply it, and we need to apply it for equity and transparency across the network.”
He said the ministry have “all sorts of interpretations of the act”, and he believed the school follows the law.
“They think, for example, that a family of three, four, five could rent a bedroom in someone else’s house to access education.”
He said some parents go to extreme lengths to trick the system, trying to get their children into the coveted double grammar zone – which has become a selling point for real estate in the area.
“People are prepared to, for example, rent a garage in a residence, they’re prepared to put a phone line into someone else’s house and say that they do live there."
O'Connor said the school had an obligation to the duty of care of students.
He said that because the school receives so many applications every year, staff need to monitor the zone carefully -- which includes using private investigators.
“We’ll use what we have to,” he said.
O’Connor said it’s about making access to education “fair for all”.
He said that in 2024, 752 out-of-zone applications were received, and there was “huge demand” due to increasing classroom sizes.
“We don’t think anyone should leapfrog and use a disingenuous method to leapfrog people who have made a fair effort to get in out of zone,” he said.
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