Meeting to discuss Phoenix replacement

Dunedin principals will meet the Ministry of Education this week to discuss a replacement service for the Phoenix Centre.

Secondary Principals Partnership chairman and Otago Boys High School rector Clive Rennie said schools' main concern was to have a alternative service in place when the second school term began in mid-April.

The Phoenix Centre, which worked with disruptive pupils who needed help readjusting their behaviour, will close at the end of term 1 (April 1), after an independent evaluation of the service found it was not meeting the Ministry of Education's required outcomes.

The evaluation and the closure have been widely condemned by education professionals, who say the results required of the centre were impossible to achieve.

"In the main, [the service] worked.

"It was only the criteria being set so high that made the Phoenix Centre fall over, " Mr Rennie said.

Secondary schools were now concerned the ministry had not organised a similar service in its place.

The principals were meeting representatives of Group Special Education, (part of the ministry) this week to discuss getting an alternative service using the $142,000 core funding from the Phoenix Centre.

Asked last week what would replace the Phoenix Centre, Ministry of Education special education deputy secretary Nick Pole said some of the pupils would be dealt with internally by schools that took up a new school-wide behaviour management programme, funding for which was available as part of a new $45 million plan for tackling disruptive behaviour in schools.

The programme involved training teachers to define and analyse specific inappropriate behaviours and readjust those behaviours.

Two secondary schools in Dunedin had already been invited to participate in the school-wide programme.

The most challenging pupils might be part of "an intensive wrap-around service" which would involved therapeutic programmes developed by a psychologist working alongside all of the professionals who were involved with the pupil and their family.

That service is still in the trial stages and will be available to only 100 pupils each year across the country.

But Mr Rennie said neither initiative solved Dunedin's immediate service gap.

They also failed to recognise the issues having disruptive pupils in a classroom created for other pupils' learning, he said.

That was why the secondary schools partnership hoped to use the Phoenix Centre's core funding, which has been promised to Dunedin schools over and above the new initiatives, so they will still have access to a service similar to that provided by the centre.

Mr Pole said the funding that was used to pay the lease on the rooms the centre used would not be available.

He did not specify how much the lease had been worth.

• It is understood the two staff employed at the Phoenix Centre have started grievance proceedings against the Ministry of Education following the closure announcement. The staff involved refused to comment when contacted.