Principals 'ignored' in Phoenix review

The only conclusion to draw from the closure of Dunedin's Phoenix Centre is that their opinion is not valued by the Ministry of Education, Dunedin secondary school principals say.

Despite telling the ministry repeatedly and unanimously they did not want to the see the service closed, and that it was successful and valuable, the closure was going ahead, the Otago Secondary Schools Partnership chairman Clive Rennie told the Otago Daily Times.

Yesterday, Ministry of Education special education deputy secretary Nicholas Pole said the Phoenix Centre was to be closed after a full and independent evaluation carried out last year found the centre was delivering poor outcomes for pupils.

For 10 years, the Forth St centre has taken pupils for up to 10 weeks at a time to rehabilitate and change their disruptive and challenging behaviour.

Schools use the programme as an alternative to suspension or exclusion.

Mr Pole said the review found there was no evidence of successful outcomes for 88% of pupils who attended the centre.

For Maori pupils, it was 95% unsuccessful.

Only 7% of the pupils who returned to school were successfully reintegrated and maintained at school following their attendance at the centre, he said.

"There is a strong and growing body of evidence about what works for these students and we can do better by them."

However, Dunedin schools rejected the ministry's review.

Mr Rennie, who is also Otago Boys High School rector, said schools found in most cases pupils in the Phoenix programme were successfully readjusted and accepted back at school.

"We believe the report is flawed quite markedly."

Every secondary principal in Dunedin wanted the Phoenix Centre to remain open, and they had told the Ministry of Education that during the review process and since the review's report was released, he said.

The only explanation for the report's finding was that the submissions of those consulted had been ignored.

"If there are changes that need to be made, that's fine, but the conclusion we draw from this is that our opinion is not valued by Group Special Education [part of the the Ministry of Education]."

He also understood the people who ran the programme had not been consulted during the review.

Barbara Peyton, manager of the Otago Youth Wellness Trust, which works with the centre, said she was concerned as a contributor to the review that she had not seen the report, and was worried that what had been said by the trust, which supported the centre, had not been reflected accurately in the report.