Onehunga High School

Deidre Shea:

The Onehunga Community is very diverse as part of its charm – we refer to it often as a slice of Auckland – it’s a neat, vibrant community, I suppose. The students are very friendly, and there is a lot of thinking outside the square in terms of our students bringing a diverse background and therefore often we need to cater for them with a diverse range and so one of the great things we have been able to do is to offer a variety of curriculum subjects with the intention of hooking the students in so that they are engaged, and if they are engaged they are happy with their learning and therefore they are going to succeed and that is certainly the case with the business school. The business school was the brainchild of Tony Falkenstein who had a sabbatical in England and did some reading.

So back in 2001, a local entrepreneur, Ship Monitor, came out and showed that New Zealand is not very good at starting companies and very few of those companies lasted more than 5 years, and they actually blamed it on education.

So his vision was to set up education where he saw a gap and that was at secondary level.

Tony Falkenstein:

The benefits of a student being involved with a business school is that they get involved in a business environment that they don’t see at home and so it is letting them experience something that they may not even know really exists so it is really opening up their eyes to the whole world.

Katie Hirst:

I just love the difference that business brings – it is not sitting there every day copying notes working from texts books – you get the real hands on learning.

Tony Falkenstein:

We have probably taken some kids who really didn’t know what they wanted to do – but business has really just given them the great sense of ‘hey that’s me’.

Katie Hirst:

Every class is different – each day you go into class you kinda don’t know what you are going to learn and you cover all aspects from finance to motivational theories and learning to manage people.

Deidre Shea:

That fact that it is experiential – the learning is experiential – is a style that appeals probably to all of us actually. And is one that is being explored more and more throughout all the levels of teaching and particularly with students that come from Maori backgrounds – one of the things that we know is that many of them like working in groups and that they certainly enjoy working hands on and that is the approach of the business school. It works with all our students.

Rebekah Ngatae:

Oh no – we are definitely not confined to the classroom – we are getting out there. We are talking to people in the business industry - we are organising events. We are really working hard. We are not just putting pens to paper – it’s a very hands on business.

Linda Everett:

Our Year 13 students recently put on a ‘Hall of Fame’ dinner and were totally in charge of organising the whole thing, which was an amazing experience for them and they got a lot out of it.

Katie Hirst:

The Hall of Fame Dinner is how to recognise former students of our school who have succeeded in business, and it is held every two years and so the Year 13 Entrepreneur class is responsible for organising it and we organise everything from the venue, so all the food selection, the layout, the decorations on the tables, to communicating with guests. So organising, inviting, getting sponsors for our tables, organising payment, tickets, entertainment – we just basically do everything – we start from scratch and build it up from there.

Linda Everett:

We saw potential in a lot of students – leadership potential, innovation, creativity and they are skills we hope they will take out to the workplace, and a lot of them will become leaders in the workplace because they have been through that experience and they know they are good at it and they are also networking at the same time so that they are making some contacts while they are doing this exercise as well.

Deidre Shea:

With the new curriculum there are so many things which are in line with business education and one of the things we have started to do some years ago is to work across the curriculum with our business education. So we have a business school and it teaches business and it teaches associated subjects but we also have used the expertise within the business school across some of our other subject areas.

Linda Everett:

Anna, one of our business students, she is also one of our graphic and design student, has put together a horticultural unit as part of a brief for a design project she was involved in and that has now been constructed by our body and construction boys down at Mount Roskill Grammar.

Anna Bish:

Hi I’m Anna Bish and I’m a Year 13 Student at the Onehunga High School Business School, and this is a project I have been working on behind me.

David Eastwood:

The business side of things has helped Anna in the sense that there was a lot of costing and calculations and also the planning. She has brought those skills along. She is also project managing as well and once again, it has given her a wide range of skills, not only in the graphics and understanding the building side of it, but also with the business.

Deidre Shea:

The approach for us is with entrepreneurial thinking in particular is that that is absolutely part of the new curriculum and needs to flavour everything we do and so that is probably the more obvious market. In terms of a business approach that too is wider than one might think of in business. Part of our construction school is a very formal approach to small business management in particular.

David Eastwood:

Oh yeah, the boys do a small business course. The reason behind that is that a lot of them follow through and are very successful in getting an apprenticeship to become a trades people. A lot of them decide to go into business themselves, you know, if you look around, you know plumbers, builders – a lot of them end up being small businessmen.

Ben Corbett:

Managing our little classroom as an enterprise, you know, its all those aspects to it. The whole idea of their rights as workers, you know, in their case, as a small construction company - so we have all these little context that we can pull these ideas out of – it is a really, really rich learning experience you know, in some cases I take the role of the employer and they are the workers and so we try to challenge them to understand their responsibilities and mine, and in this case they take the role of a contracting company coming in. The next question is how do we make money out of it? If I was to be working how much should I be charging? It just goes on and on and on.

Deidre Shea:

One of the wonderful things about the construction school is that every student who has wanted to have career either progressing through an apprenticeship in the construction industry or a job in the construction industry has now got a pathway directly from school into that, and as you can see from the project behind you, the students get the sorts of skills that make them extremely marketable.

There’s a fair bit of freedom in terms of topic approach, what it is that you’re wanting to do in terms of business and/or entrepreneurship and so in any learning, if students can own the background or choose the subject that they are looking at or focusing on terms of what the business is, then that will advantage them and that too is a part of the way that the business school operates.

Tony Falkenstein:

The great thing about business is its stories, and they are stories that are going on all the time, they are going on in the newspaper, every day a business teacher can say “hey look what’s happened here” and so if you’re applying those stories to mathematics it makes it a lot more interesting, or to things that have gone on in history, or science, you really can apply those stories and then the kids can really remember them.

Deidre Shea:

In teaching in the business school, it’s a bit like everything, it depends on the person as to whether it’s beneficial for them to have practical experience of business, it can’t hurt – and so if you’ve got practical experience, it’s got to be a good thing, but we do have teachers who do not have personal, practical experience of business and they too do a great job – but what we do do, is to nurture the relationships we have with business people in the community, and in the wider community as well, and we bring them in frequently so that our students and our teachers can benefit from them, but also the on-going professional relationship that we have in terms of education with the universities, so that we’ve got that professional interchange happening as well as the practical professional interchange with businesses themselves.

Linda Everett:

And how we build and maintain those relationships is that we invite the business folk in to be guest speakers, we send them a quarterly newsletter which they can also contribute to, they get to be involved in all sorts of events we have running here, and our students get to go along to seminars and events and conferences that they put on, and they also sponsor a lot of our kids to go to those events.

Tony Falkenstein:

What I found was that businesses and the local business community love to be involved but nobody ever asks them so every Wednesday morning somebody comes in from outside and talks to the students and we have asked all sorts of people and never get a rejection.

Deidre Shea:

At times, the approach has been made by people coming in but often its about us going out and talking about what it is that we are trying to do and inviting that support and people have been really, really keen to do so.

Tony Falkenstein:

We’ve had Sam Morgan in there, we’ve had – a lot of people only 7 or 8 years older than them who have run very successful businesses, and suddenly they can see – “Gee whiz, I don’t just have to be something in Onehunga, I can be something in Auckland or the world”.

Deidre Shea:

Other schools are adopting this business approach, it’s quite exciting – we have a pretty much open door policy and we have people including other schools coming through our school and we’re really happy to share what we’ve done and hope that can be of help to other people. And I’d like to think that education is becoming more like that all the time as well because it is about sharing best practice because what we’re all trying to do is give all of our young people the best opportunities for the future.

Linda Everett:

We have students from Year 9 coming through the Business School and they do a compulsory module for a term, they get a taste for it - if they like it then they can go on and choose an option in Year 10 and we pathway right through to Year 13. So we’re a few years down the track now and we’re starting to have students come out of tertiary and go into the workplace, and we’re finding we’ve had some real successes. We’ve got one of our former students who has been top student at AUT for the past four years while she’s completing her degree, and we have another student who is about to launch his own business in two weeks. So that’s really exciting for us and it’s really exciting for the students here too, they get to see that and those students will come back and talk to them as a guest speaker or just generally in class so they get a feel for what they can look forward to later on.

Deidre Shea:

The success I think for the school is not only about outcomes in terms of what the students achieve formally with degrees and job prospects, but more particularly about their attitude and their approach, and so the students because they have worked with corporates, they’ve worked with small groups, they’ve worked presenting, all these sorts of things, they develop greater sense of presence, greater self-confidence certainly more skills in working in whatever way it is that’s needed to happen.

Katie Hirst:

We’re in a changing world, and you’ve got to be that one step ahead of everyone else to actually get somewhere. We’ve had so many developments over the last decade and we’ve just to keep developing and to keep on top of the world I think New Zealand just has to be up there in business, it’s definitely the way of the future.

Tony Falkenstein:

The Onehunga model has really shown that students want it, their parents want it, the local business community wants to be involved in it and the tertiary institutions want it, it’s a model that works and I think every school should take up the challenge and make it work for them.

Deidre Shea:

If our young people leave our schools able to think outside the square, able to think in creative ways, able to present themselves confident with all sorts of different approaches and this is what entrepreneurial thinking is all about, then we have young people who are ready to contribute successfully and positively to the future. If we continue to teach and learn in the ways of yesterday, then we don’t, and so we must look forward to a world that has successful confident young people, so that we know we’ve got a bright future.