Snow greeted Billie-Jean Potaka Ayton in September 2009 as she travelled through the Waioeka Gorge to take up her new job in Gisborne.
A decade-long winter of falling rolls and resulting teacher losses showed no sign of abating at Kaiti School, where she was to be the fourth principal that year.
The school had six teachers for 130 students, and the Ministry of Education was preparing to remove empty classrooms for use on the East Coast.
Fifteen years later, she is still Kaiti School principal and she has been made a member of the New Zealand Order of Merit for “services to education and Māori” in the New Year Honours list.
Kaiti School has a roll of 450 students across 20 classrooms – 21 in the new year – and 20 teachers in a total staff of 54. The larger figure includes teacher aides, senior leaders who are not in classes, release teachers, a sports teacher and literacy specialists.
The school caters for students from Years 1 to 8, in a region (Tūranga-nui-a-Kiwa/Gisborne) where 56% of the population are of Māori descent, 90% of students at Kaiti School identify as Māori and 7% identify as Pacific peoples.
Under Potaka Ayton’s leadership, the school has had consistently high attendance rates, high levels of student success and increased whānau engagement. She has led curriculum changes to reflect the students and their whakapapa, and supported and developed bilingual Māori immersion learning.
Kaiti School received the Supreme Award at the 2011 Māori Language Awards. From 2013, Potaka Ayton encouraged the students in a campaign to restore the name Tūranganui-a-Kiwa to the region known as Poverty Bay ... in 2019 the name was changed to Tūranganui-a-Kiwa/Poverty Bay.
Kaiti became the first Whānau Ora school in a kaupapa designed to provide programmes and pathways to uplift and strengthen whānau. In 2015, Kaiti was a finalist in the Prime Minister’s Education Excellence Awards.
Potaka Ayton, 51, is a member of the Education Review Office’s Principals Advisory Group and a board member on the Springboard Trust, a cross-sector organisation that brings together leaders in education, private, public and philanthropic sectors to develop strategic leadership skills.
All that was far in the future when Potaka Ayton (Ngati Whakaue, Ngati Pikiao) took over. She was younger than most other primary school principals in town at the time.
“My first leadership adviser told me she was shocked I got the job,” she said.
“My second meeting was with the Ministry [of Education]. They were going to take a block of classrooms away from us and take them up the coast.”
She stopped that happening.
“We had six classrooms in use out of 13. They’re all full now, and we’ve built seven new learning spaces. Next year another classroom will be added to bring the total to 21.
“We focus on our students and provide them with opportunities to do things they wouldn’t normally get to do, but basic things, too ... like sport. We had no sports teams when I started, so parents wouldn’t show up.”
Getting teams up and running meant parental input, as coaches and supporters.
“Our parents are amazing,” Potaka Ayton said.
“We have seven sports academies now. The touch academy – our academy of the year – has over 100 players. Parents want their kids to play sport. You just have to make sure it happens.”
Kaiti School is supported by the Horouta Whānau Ora Collective. Whānau Ora is a culturally based, whānau-centred approach to wellbeing that aims to help families determine their own goals.
“We have a kaiarahi [navigator] who works with whānau fulltime ... 50 families as at the end of this year and 22 to be enrolled in the new year. It’s creating an environment where they are valued and supported.
“It might be around education, physical wellbeing, parenting or employment. The navigator works alongside whānau over a period of 12 months so they can achieve their goals.
“Most of the time, the parents sign themselves up. Sometimes we recommend they be part of it.
“We’ve been fortunate to be part of Whānau Ora for over 10 years,” Potaka Ayton said.
“It’s not the only way we get parents on board. We make sure that we’re doing a good job and that the kids are doing the best they can. If they’re not achieving, they get the support they need to achieve.
“We have whānau hui once a year, and they are quite short – 60 minutes. The parents talk and share their ideas, and we listen. We gather all of the ideas put forward and the board selects a couple to run with, and then we make them happen in the next year. It shows we value what the parents think.”
When Potaka Ayton arrived, Kaiti was a Decile 1 school, which meant it was in the 10% of schools with the highest proportion of students from low socioeconomic backgrounds.
From January 2023, the decile system was phased out, to be replaced by Equity Index ratings.
“We draw from a range of whānau,” Potaka-Ayton said.
“A large percentage of them are employed, and some own a business. We have children from single-parent families, and children who are looked after by their grandparents. We also have a lot of third- or fourth-generation Kaiti School families who have come back to Kaiti.
“Our curriculum reflects the children who attend. It has a strong te ao Māori [Māori worldview] focus. The school has a bilingual pathway to Year 8.
“And we make sure they come to school. We employ our own attendance kaiarahi [guide]. We had 67 kids with a 100% attendance record in Term 4. The average is 90% by daily attendance. We’re sad if it’s at 85% on a wet day.
“We track data and monitor progress against the initiatives we have set.
“We train our own teachers. We recruit them as teacher aides and while they are working with us, they study. While training, they learn about our school learning culture, kawa [protocol] and community.”
Connections figure strongly in the Kaiti School make-up.
“We have a good relationship with Te Wananga o Raukawa at Ōtaki, where groups spend time four or five times a year.”
Being connected to the right people helped Kaiti School staff do a good job, Potaka Ayton said.
“We are part of the Porouariki Kahui Ako, a community of learning,” she said.
“We work with schools on the coast, completing professional development for the teachers and visiting schools to provide learning opportunities for students.
“We are supported by Maru Whakatipua, an iwi-led initiative that helps schools to train their own to be kaiako [teachers] and develop their whānau engagement strategy.”
A nine-strong leadership team at Kaiti School meant things were done a lot faster, because members were working across several initiatives at the same time, Potaka Ayton said.
“We are lucky at Kaiti to have a very active school board,” she said. “Its members are very supportive at a governance level. They are experienced and provide the back-up and foresight needed.”
Staff spent a lot of time with children from difficult backgrounds, Potaka Ayton said.
“We make sure that teachers who have those children in their classrooms have teacher aide support and external specialists who work with these children and their families.”
The main instruction, particularly to the boys, was: “Stay in your lane.”
“I tell them, ‘You have become distracted, stay in your lane, focus on yourself’. They come to me and say, ‘Oh, Kōkā [auntie, teacher], I didn’t stay in my lane.’
“To stop those boys doing stuff they are not supposed to be doing, the first thing is to get them happy about learning, to be connected to something at kura [school] and have a purpose. You want their family involved and proud of them. And you want them to be self-regulated.
“Once they have all that down, they can learn and be successful. It probably takes about 12 months to turn them around.
“Exceptional teachers are the reason those kids turn around ... teachers who are consistent with them every day, who set boundaries they might not have, and who believe in them.
“I just think the kids are happy at our school. Every day, every week things are happening. They show up because they want to be part of those things. We don’t get it right every day, but we learn from our mistakes and try to be better tomorrow.”
Potaka Ayton’s grandmother, Hinetara Potaka, worked in the Kōhanga Reo [language nest] movement, and travelled around the Pacific and Australia working in education for indigenous people. In 1976 she was made an officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) for services to the Māori people, especially in the field of education and welfare. In 1997 she was made a companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit (CNZM) for services to the community.
“She’s pretty much the reason I became a teacher,” Potaka Ayton said.
“I couldn’t decide what I wanted to do, and my grandmother said if we couldn’t decide, we would be teachers.
“When I got the email [with news of the award of MNZM] I had a bit of a tangi [cry] and thought she would be proud. She died in 2000 at the age of 72.”
Potaka Ayton grew up in Maketū in the Bay of Plenty and is part of a third-generation family of kiwifruit orchardists.
“The Potaka family were the first Māori to plant kiwifruit [commercially] in New Zealand,” she said.
She, her sister and their three brothers each have different jobs in connection with the orchards. Hers is to keep on top of the finances.
Educated at Maketū School, Te Puke Intermediate and Te Puke High School (where she was head girl), she studied at the University of Waikato and then at the University of Auckland, where she completed a Bachelor of Education (Teaching) degree and a Graduate Diploma of Education.
Although Potaka Ayton started teaching at a Decile 1 Māngere school, Nga Iwi, her husband, Michael Ayton (also from Maketu) was a warrant officer in the navy, so she got a job at a Decile 10 North Shore school, Albany Primary, where she stayed four years.
She also taught at another Decile 1 school, Onepoto Primary in Northcote, for four years before returning to Nga Iwi as associate principal and staying four years.
“Gisborne was going to be four years, too, but we enjoyed living down here. Michael had just left the navy and Gisborne had everything we wanted . . . just a few traffic lights, roundabouts everywhere, a three-minute drive to work and all the activities you can think of for your children (a son and daughter, now teenagers).”
Michael is area manager for Smart Environmental, a recent Gisborne arrival in the waste management field.
“I am so lucky to have my whānau,” Potaka Ayton said.
“They put up with a lot, having a mum who is a principal. It’s not easy being a teacher’s kid.”
