Care for foreign students lacking

One in five schools and almost half of private education providers are failing to meet required standards of care for international students, a new report reveals.

A Ministry of Education report for Parliament shows despite a 25 per cent decrease in the number of international students since 2003, there was a 45 per cent increase in the number of complaints by students over the same period.

"We've got to look after these kids. They're in a foreign environment," Canterbury-Westland Secondary Principals' Association chairman Denis Pyatt said yesterday.

"There's no doubt at all that in the late '90s and the early 2000s, the New Zealand education system in its entirety did its best to kill the golden goose, because it was not stringent enough on itself at ensuring high quality."

Maltreatment of foreign students was highlighted in July this year when a 15-year-old student at Hokitika's Westland High School complained of being beaten by his home-stay parents. He claimed he had money stolen at another home.

The Ministry of Education report, released late last week, showed that of the 216 schools checked between July last year and June this year, 40 did not comply with all areas of the code of pastoral care relating to welfare, accommodation, and grievance procedures.

Pyatt said this was not necessarily a bad result.

"If 40 schools were found in some way wanting, without wishing to minimise it, I would think that's not a bad average in a way, because a lot of the (code) stuff is very nit-picky," he said.

However, "we just simply cannot afford to get it wrong again," Pyatt said.

"Many schools are highly dependent on income from them, but also, more than that, we are aware that these international students for us represent a gateway into the overseas world for our kids. It's more than just the money."

Foreign students flooded into New Zealand schools between 1999 and 2003 peaking at a total of 121,190 international fee-paying students. Since 2003, the number has fallen to 91,301.

Complaints by foreign students to the International Education Appeal Authority have leapt from 39 a year to 71 a year over the same period.

Teenaged foreign students in private training enterprises were also a concern, according to the report. About 13 per cent of instances of non-compliance with the code at such enterprises related to students aged under 18.

Only 56 per cent of private training enterprises fully complied with the code.

Mae Dawson, principal of the Christchurch International College and president of the Zhonghua Chinese Society, said more training enterprises now understood the code.

"The Government is quite tough on PTEs. I believe at my school we do a good job with these things."

She said maybe there should be more focus on problems in public schools and cited the Westland High School case as an example.

"From the Government point of view, they think the public schools are wonderful, or something, but there are obviously some gaps there," she said.

"They can operate like that because they are a big organisation nobody can push them around," Dawson said.

A fifth of the cases of private training enterprises not complying with the code related to either support services or accommodation.

- © Fairfax NZ News