Going the Distance: 100 Years of Te Aho o Te Kura Pounamu The Correspondence School

From a sole teacher to New Zealand's largest school, Going the Distance tells the 100-year story of how a correspondence scheme, a "doubtful experiment" became the Department of Education's Correspondence School and later through a series of remarkable transformations - Te Aho o Te Kura Pounamu, which now enrols more than 25,000 students a year and is the country's largest Maori school. The Minister of Education, Chris Hipkins, has described Te Kura's work with the country's most vulnerable students as one of the great untold stories of the New Zealand education system. Back in 1922, the first teacher, Miss Janet MacKenzie, was expecting to enrol about 25 "backblocks"students, but such was the clamour for education that the numbers rocketed with 100 on the roll by the time lessons began. By the end of the year, there were almost 350 pupils, with every lesson, every correction, every letter to pupil and parent handwritten by the sole teacher. The book follows the school's history through the appointments of several headmasters, all of whom were determined that the pupils should have a "real school". They held exhibitions of students work (attended by many dignitaries of the day), formed a multitude of clubs, established a museum, built an extensive library, sent out teachers into isolated districts. These visiting teacher reached their remote pupils through an astonishing range of transport, including by dinghy, horseback and on gun carriers. Residential schools were also held every year where the "corrie kids" would spend a month with their schoolmates, who they got to know through the pages of their annual magazine, the Postman. A lot of the story is related by the pupils themselves in the prose and verse they contributed to the Postman, from 1928 to 2002.