What makes alternative education work

Alternative education (AE) programmes across Aotearoa are supporting students who disengage from education to reconnect with learning, develop confidence, and plan for their futures. Recent research and student voices highlight what makes these programmes successful, and how educators can build on that success. Dr Lloyd Martin explains.

Over the past few months, a series of media stories have highlighted positive outcomes for former students in alternative education (AE) programmes. These reflect what many educators and students already know: when AE is designed around relationships, flexible learning and trust, it can be life changing.

A recent study Don’t Give Up On Us (Martin, 2024), followed a cohort of ākonga across six AE programmes for a year; it focused on what was changing for them, and what they thought was helping to create those changes.

Their answers to the second question were clear: having a stable connection with a positive adult; getting individualised support with their work in a safe space, and learning at their own pace.

Understanding the context

School disengagement is often part of a wider set of difficulties that a young person is dealing with. The students who took part in the 2024 study were also dealing with personal loss, abusive situations, isolation and other forms of adversity.

Compared with the general student population, students who have been referred into an AE programme are (for example) 25 times more likely to have had an FGC (family group conference), nine times more likely to have been in the care of Oranga Tamariki, and four times more likely to have been referred to a specialist mental health service (source: ERO 2023).

If the rest of their life is a struggle, students who are going through adversity have an even greater need for school to be a safe and supportive place. However, the ākonga in the 2024 research cohort reflected that their experiences had left them unprepared to cope with a large secondary school environment, where all reported feeling unsafe.

Many young people arrive at an AE programme in a crisis, which is often a result of their experiences at both home and school.

A trauma informed approach begins with the question, “What works to help them re-engage”?

Stabilising and building trust

The first phase of AE involves supporting ākonga through their crisis, a process that can take anything from weeks to months.

This is an essential part of the journey, yet this work is often invisible in traditional metrics. If most students arrive at an AE programme in survival mode, the biggest issue identified by those in the research cohort was finding an adult that they connected with and could trust.

Building trust is often underpinned by practical care. Most AE programmes stretch their limited resources to meet a wide range of practical needs, including transport, food, clothing, counselling and health support.

With their mum in and out of mental health care services, one of the students in the research cohort had got to the point where they felt able to share with their AE tutor when there was no food at home. Going to the supermarket together to fill a couple of bags with groceries from time-to-time built trust and created an opportunity to work on some practical maths.

Teaching to the North-East, Russell Bishop’s (2019) work on relationship-based learning resonates with good practice in alternative education.

Effective AE programmes navigate a balance between creating a supportive and safe community and maintaining a culture of high expectations around what their students are capable of.

As Russell has noted, high expectations alone just get their backs up, and low expectations of what they are capable of are corrosive to good educational practice.

Much earlier, Anton Makarenko, a Ukrainian pioneer in alternative education who died in 1939, challenged a group of school leaders to ‘see the potential in every young person’. He added that for those that we can’t, we are probably doing more harm than good.

The path to re-engagement

Effective approaches to re-engaging AE students also comes from understanding how the disciplines of education and youth development overlap.

The ability to focus on a task, work cooperatively with others and carry out an intended action are developmental issues, but according to [Russian psychologist Lev] Vygotsky these abilities also create a foundation for higher levels of learning.

The development of these psychological assets is impacted by traumatic experience, and for many AE students, unmet developmental needs have been at the root of their spiralling disengagement from education.

Addressing developmental issues is critical to helping students through the first phase. These are met in the context of positive connections and multiple ‘mini experiences’ in scaffolded social situations.

As summarised by Brendtro et al. (2019), developmental experiences help to:

• Instil a sense of belonging

• Foster experiences of mastering a skill

• Build trust through responsibility

• Engage students in generosity toward others. For children who grow up with stable attachments, these experiences occur naturally. They are often missing for those who haven’t.

Future goals

The second phase involves re-engagement with learning. By the time they are out of survival mode and are beginning to think about their future, most AE students have missed significant chunks of work, and many only have a few months left of their time in AE. Simply trying to catch them up with learning can reinforce an ongoing sense of failure for those who are most behind.

Most of the students in the research cohort talked about wanting to enter a trade. However, the 2023 ERO report into Alternative Education found that only one in five students currently get to the first step in meeting the entry criteria for a trades course.

If we are to break future cycles of dysfunction and involvement in the justice system, our challenge is finding innovative ways to ensure that AE students are able to achieve a tohu that reflects what they have accomplished and better supports them toward their goals.

The Ministry of Education describes AE as a pathway to school, further education, training, or employment. These are all outcomes that create new possibilities for the young people involved. It is time for a further conversation about more effective ways to achieve this vision.

Education Gazette: Alternative Education model in Porirua grounded in trust and youth work

Bishop, R. (2019). Teaching to the North-East, relationshipbased learning in practice. NZCER Press.

Brendtro, L., & Brokenleg, M. & Van Bockern, S. (2019). Reclaiming youth at risk: Futures of Promise (3rd Edition). Solution Tree Press.

Education Review Office (2023). An Alternative Education? Support for our most disengaged young people. Te Ihuwaka, Education Evaluation Centre.

Martin, L. (2024). Don’t give up on us, young people’s experiences of change in alternative education (Ed.D. thesis). Te Herenga Waka, Victoria University of Wellington.