Macleans College in Auckland recently made headlines because it reportedly kicked out nine students in the past year for being fraudulently enrolled.
That means the families of those students didn’t live in the zone for Macleans College but lied about their addresses to make it look like they did.
Secondary principals’ association president Vaughan Couillault told Breakfast this was not an isolated incident, and would continue as long as the population in Auckland continued to increase.
Enrolment fraud isn’t a new concept — it’s been around since the 1980s, an expert says.
Reasons for doing it varied but included the cost of living, housing crisis and zoning.
Re: News spoke to a mum who has carried out enrolment fraud and asked an education expert about why parents would lie to schools about their address.
Lying to give your child a stable education
Sophie — a pseudonym to protect her child — is a single parent in her mid-thirties living in Auckland with her 13-year-old daughter.
The two have moved across 11 different houses over the course of her daughter’s life, switching between renting and living with family, she says.
Sophie says her housing instability has been caused by the cost of living, the housing shortage, separating from her previous partner and the “general instability of your 20s”.
Despite the constant moving, she has been able to send her daughter to the same school since she was 5 years old.
How? She’s been lying about her address from the get-go.
Sophie’s friend lives in a zone for a school central to where Sophie lives, so she used their address to get her daughter enrolled.
She’s been getting school mail sent to her friend’s house for years without issue, she says.
Sophie says all of the houses she’s lived in with her daughter have been in the same area as her daughter’s school but because the population is dense, the school zones are small.
“Our last three houses were all off the same main road as well, so all still within a few minutes drive… But all still not in-zone. And all in zones for different schools… Just because of the side of the main road they’re on.
“I would have had to change her each time, and I think it was just a conscious decision we made when we enrolled at school that we didn’t move her constantly.”
Nine enrolments cancelled this year
The Ministry of Education’s leader of operations and integration, Sean Teddy, says enrolment occurs on the first day of attendance at the school, and a student’s address must be genuinely in-zone at that time to have the right to enrol.
Once enrolled, students have the right to remain at a school to ensure continuity of education, even if they move to an out-of-zone address.
The ministry is aware of a small number of schools having enrolment issues because of false addresses.
“A school board may annul an enrolment in specific situations where the address provided is not genuine,” Teddy says.
Using a temporary address can be valid if a family is moving between cities or living in emergency housing, but using one just to gain entry to a school is not valid, he says.
So far in 2024, Teddy says nine students have had enrolments cancelled — eight in Auckland and one in Nelson.
Teddy says if a family appeals an annulment, the ministry reviews the case and may direct a school board to re-enrol a student if they are found to legitimately be living in-zone.
Housing instability
Sophie says she struggled to find an affordable place fit for her child.
“We looked at houses that were literally like rotting basements, type things. We went to one that didn’t even have any windows.”
She says she was able to secure her current rental because the owners specifically wanted to rent it to a single parent.
Sophie’s daughter is off to high school next year and Sophie says she will give their current, real address while enrolling because they are in-zone for it.
However, she says if she moved halfway through her daughter’s time at high school, she would make her daughter switch schools.
“I wouldn’t do the same for high school that I’ve done for primary… It’s just the formative years, right, where they do need that consistency.”
Zoning has moved away from its original goals
Stuart Deerness is a senior lecturer in education at Auckland University of Technology and says schools being given control over zoning might have increased inequalities in education.
Zoning was first introduced for primary schools in 1924 and to secondary schools in 1932 to prevent overcrowding and spread students evenly across different schools, Deerness says.
After World War II, New Zealand’s population grew, the school leaving age increased to 15 and more students wanted to stay in formal education for longer, he says.
Deerness says that’s when zoning developed an egalitarian purpose — to protect the right of local kids to attend local schools.
But, in 1989, the Tomorrow’s Schools programme came about and pushed schools to be more self-managing.
“Up until this point, the Government had had a big role to play in determining zones. But during that period, we saw this shift from that centralised control over to local school control,” Deerness says.
That change led more powerful schools to manipulate their zones to include wealthier suburbs and exclude poorer suburbs so they could attract more “valuable” students, he says.
He says if a school looks more desirable and affluent, more parents might want to enrol their children there.
Deerness says the more students a school has, the more funding it gets. That can bring in more teachers and more opportunities, which can keep making the school look desirable.
He says some students live in areas where they cannot choose where they go to school, while other students have many choices because there are many school zones that overlap where they live.
Allowing schools to manage zones might also be why different sides of the same street could fall under different school zones, he says.
Parents have different reasons for lying
Some parents resort to enrolment fraud to get their kids into “good” schools, which Deerness says is driven by the reputation of a school rather than the reality of it.
“There’s much greater variance [in opportunities and achievements] within any one school than there is between schools. So, actually, there’s not a lot of difference between going to a more desirable school and a less desirable school,” he says.
Niether Deerness and Sophie think of what Sophie’s done as “fraud”.
Deerness says “there’s been cases where people have rented out their mailbox to allow people to use their mailbox as an address… for the sole reason of being able to enrol into a ‘desirable’ school” which is not comparable to Sophie’s situation.
He says he encourages schools to have compassion for the circumstances of the people they are dealing with.
“If you’re dealing with someone that’s intentionally lied from the outset to try to get an advantage, that’s different to someone who doesn’t have the stability to have a permanent location,” Deerness says.
He says there needs to be some flexibility built into the zoning system but that’s not the same as people being able to choose schools based on desirability.
“That creates a system where some people are in a position where they can choose and other people can’t choose. That sort of further compounds some of those inequalities.
“It’s a complex situation and we need a complex system to respond to that.”
