As house prices rise, Wellington area school rolls are falling

Thursday, 13 January 2022

Rāroa Intermediate school principal Stephen Eames said the rising cost of living in the capital put a strain on families causing an “unsettling” flow-on effect for schools.

Wellington schools are struggling with marked roll fluctuations, as the region’s housing crisis prices young families out of the market.

The unbridled growth in property values is changing the shape of Wellington’s schools: those in pricey suburbs are experiencing a decline in student numbers, while those in more affordable areas north of the city centre are struggling to keep up with demand.

The Ministry of Education’s 2019 national growth plan aims to account for demographic and population changes in each region. But as Kelburn Normal School principal Andrew Bird points out, no-one could have predicted how the capital’s housing market was going to boom.

“There’s different energy around in the housing market,” Bird said.

At nearly $8 million, this large house on five titles was in the running to be the priciest home to be offered for sale in Wellington. (Video first screened in October 2020).

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Rāroa Intermediate school principal Stephen Eames: “We’re in the middle of changes on both sides - the result of changing demographics is quite unsettling.”

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North of the city, Porirua principals say they face significant increases in student numbers due to Covid-19, a development boom and improved school reputations.

The shape of Wellington’s school community is fast evolving, and that’s unsettling for schools, Rāroa Intermediate principal Stephen Eames said.

The Johnsonville-based school sits in-between increasingly expensive suburbs to the south – average house prices in Khandallah, Wadestown and Johnsonville – have all passed the $1m mark – and more affordable suburbs to the north.

The roll is expected to grow this year, with provision made for two extra classrooms, but Eames isn’t certain that growth will continue. Rāroa’s feeder schools in the south are seeing fewer five-year-olds coming through.

Every suburb in Wellington is a million-dollar suburb, and an average home costs eight times the average household income.

In the short-term, Rāroa Intermediate is predicting a decline in numbers, followed by growth as new developments in Stebbings, Churton Park and Amesbury go up.

“We’re in the middle of changes on both sides – the result of changing demographics is quite unsettling,” Eames said.

That unpredictability has a direct impact on the area. For schools, it can become a high-stakes guessing game around staffing, property and student pathways.

“People are already struggling in the Covid environment – whether it’s job-wise or complex family situations – and the rising cost of living is putting quite a strain on the environment, which has a flow-on effect on schools.”

Economist Brad Olsen said the Wellington housing market was pushing people to “extreme limits”, forcing them to achieve milestones later, and driving them out of Wellington city.

Wellington housing market pushes families to the ‘limits’

Infometrics principal economist Brad Olsen said the Wellington housing market was pushing people to extreme limits.

Across the Wellington city area, every suburb is now a million-dollar suburb, thanks to a 60 per cent increase in house prices during the past three years. An average home in the capital now costs more than eight times the average annual household income.

The region also has some of the lowest housing stock in the country – so people are looking outside of Wellington city.

Massey University sociologist Paul Spoonley said one of the key trends shaping changing school rolls is “peri-urban migration” – where people move to more rural areas outside urban centres.

People are moving out of main centres, but not going far.

That means Auckland is losing residents to a growing Hamilton and Bay of Plenty; people are leaving Christchurch for Selwyn and Waimakariri. Wellingtonians are heading to Upper Hutt or the Kāpiti Coast.

Another factor, Spoonley said, was that New Zealand women were choosing to have children later, and having fewer of them.

Olsen said the pressures of high living costs were pushing young families to delay the “milestones” – it’s now common to take a decade to save for a house deposit, for instance.

At the same time, homeowners are holding on to properties for longer, and not moving around cities like they used to.

“This all means that people in Wellington are having to be a lot more dynamic about where they're living. And that is starting to challenge where they might be sending their kids for school or what other amenities they might be accessing.”

Some schools threatened as young families shut out of suburbs

Bird, the Kelburn principal, said it was vital young families could move into the area, and that older families moved out.

“Unless new families are coming into the area with young children, then the school is going to die,” Bird said.

The primary school’s roll decreased slightly in 2021, to about 300.

At a squeeze, the central-city decile-10 school can take up to 340 students in its newly built classrooms, but just over 300 is comfortable.

The average house price in Kelburn is $1.54 million, making it one of the most expensive suburbs in Wellington, behind Oriental Bay/Roseneath and Seatoun.

Add to that the recent loss of international students, and the school is facing headwinds when it comes to retaining its roll.

In order to ensure roll size didn’t drop significantly, Bird said people needed to move out of the area once their children were no longer school-age.

But the short supply of houses is limiting that once-natural mobility.

Rāroa’s Eames made a similar observation. Areas like Ngaio, Khandallah and Crofton Downs to the south of Johnsonville had traditionally been family areas. Now they were out of reach for a lot of young families.

Building and construction at Kenepuru Landing, in Porirua. A number of housing developments means the city will see thousands of new homes in the next decade.

Those who could afford to buy there tended to be corporate couples without children or who planned to have children later in life, he said.

Picking a school was dependent on more than house prices: school size, grade and reputation, proximity to work.

Seatoun School principal John Western said 2022 would see a slight reduction of the school’s roll, to 398 students from 405 the previous year.

While the expensive suburb’s prices (average house prices over $2m) locked out a large proportion of young families buying their first or second home – and even those looking to rent where average rents are over $600 a week – there was a specific demographic who could afford to buy in the area, Western said.

Aotea College’s was expected to have a roll of 950 in 2020, but was actually 1050. That has grown to 1200 by 2022.

Northern schools don’t want ‘uncontrolled growth’

But in Porirua, high school rolls are increasing – a mixed blessing for school leaders.

Porirua College principal Ragne Maxwell said while welcoming more students had positives, the school didn't want “uncontrolled growth”.

For the past four years, the roll has grown “quite significantly' – between 500 and 600 students. And this year, the high school roll will increase to 650 students.

“We are predicted to be at 700 students in four years, but we have almost already reached that this year.”

That was down to a range of factors, Maxwell said.

“Traditionally a large number of students have gone out of Porirua for schooling and that certainly seems to be changing. Part of that is about the schools being seen more positively by the local communities.”

Aotea College principal Kate Gainsford said she had been telling the Ministry of Education her school was growing for years.

Covid-19 had also had an impact on people moving back into the community from Australia and other New Zealand centres.

In coming years, Porirua would face more development, the city’s regeneration project bringing a planned 2000 new homes to the city.

“We have to work really hard to ensure we are able to deal with the numbers coming in, including putting resources into pastoral care, so that students connect to the school and become part of the school, and find a home with us,” Maxwell said.

Nearby, Aotea College is also growing fast.

The school, entirely rebuilt by the Ministry of Education after years of mouldy and substandard buildings, catered for 950 students. But when students and teachers moved in, in 2020, there were already 100 more students than that.

The school roll for this year has already ballooned to 1200 students.

Principal Kate Gainsford said she has been telling the ministry for years that the school is growing – but it’s taken time for that message to get through.

That leaves schools searching for the resources: enough staff, enough infrastructure, enough appropriate technology to allow for the growth.

The ministry has now formally recognised the school is facing permanent growth, and the expectation is new classrooms will come.

Gainsford estimated the school would need between six and 12 new classrooms over the next several years.

“Beyond that, we will need more, that’s why there needs to be a permanent design solution, it’s no good bringing lots and lots of random individual classrooms and plonking them around the place, a school is a community, and there needs to be thought for how people get from one place to another, with timetables to consider.”

Population growth across a city fell across a whole community, Gainsford said.

“You can manage the number of kids by reducing the size of the enrolment zone, but those kids still have to go to a school, so it has to be more than a single-school solution, because it impacts a whole city.”

New Zealand Principals’ Federation president Cherie Taylor-Patel said the ministry needed to keep communicating with principals, to ensure schools weren’t left crumbling under growth pressure.

Principals were connected to their communities. They had a good knowledge of developments and changes to the student pool before officials could access statistical demographic information.

“[The Ministry of Education] are always a bit behind what is needed in the area,” Taylor-Patel said.

Like Gainsford, Taylor-Patel – an Auckland primary school principal – said she’d noticed teaching staff leaving big cities due to high house prices.

“It’s not only the young teachers that we are losing, we have lost some of our more experienced teachers who have decided to sell up and shift out of Auckland … where they can have a low mortgage or no mortgage.”

While those at the coalface feel the approach to growth planning has been haphazard, in 2019 the ministry put together a national growth plan, with a region-by-region breakdown of expected areas of growth, and provision for that growth.

In Wellington, the two main areas of school roll growth that the ministry identified were northern Kāpiti and Wellington north, through greenfields development, and in central Wellington, through intensification.

The ministry’s Sean Teddy said while it factored in the changing housing market, its medium- and long-term plans were more based on population projections, housing developments, and more student places required at schools.

The ministry regularly monitored the capacity and projected growth of the school network using a range of data including population projections, planned housing developments, census data, local council information, how well schools were utilised, and enrolment data, Teddy said.