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5 August, 2020
Departing principal proud of help given to ‘difficult’ few
and a teacher there for almost as long again.
After 38 years at Wairau Intermediate, Grant Murray is stepping down as principal, but he’s not ready to embrace the word retirement. “I’d like to finish my time in teaching back in the classroom,” he says, adding that his plans to do part-time relief work next year would be at another school.
“I wouldn’t come back here, I don’t think that would be very fair.” But he will be on hand to help a new principal settle in, with his tenure officially ending in late January.
Murray’s time at Wairau goes back to the intermediate’s opening in 1980. He rose through the teaching ranks, becoming principal 20 years ago. He first arrived to a non-permanent post in his second year of teaching. After a few years elsewhere, he jumped at the chance to return.
The place is special, he says, being what the board of trustees refers to as a “boutique intermediate”. With 300 students from 26 nationalities, the school aims for a family atmosphere where everyone knows each other and is encouraged to do their individual best.
Murray is proud Wairau has a reputation for dealing with difficult children, even if it means having them take time out to settle in his office. “If you bite back at them, you’re not getting at the reasons they’re like that.”
Under Murray’s leadership, the school has drawn out-of-area pupils, including foreign students who help with revenue, allowing the employment of extra teacher-aide support and a counsellor. Class sizes are kept smaller than standard, and the lower roll makes it easier to join sports teams and cultural groups. “If you want to get in the choir and you can hold a tune in a bucket you don’t get told there were 200 applicants and you missed out.”
Murray has mixed feelings about national achievement standards, saying they are useful for benchmarking performance, but do not fairly reflect individual effort or factor in where students are when they arrive. Seeing how students progressed, often over years, confirmed this, he says. An example was a boy who had suffered a childhood brain injury in a crash and been told he would not be able to gain a licence or manage detailed work with his compromised motor skills. Years later he drove up and talked proudly about his cabinetmaking apprenticeship.
Murray reckons 99 per cent of kids are wonderful. He doesn’t like to give up on the others, and says in all his years teaching there was only one child he pegged as heading to jail. Sure enough, he wound up there.
Over the decades societal pressures and issues at home for children have definitely stepped up, Murray says. Social media is a minefield. He says parents should monitor its use, having passwords for their children’s accounts, keeping devices in the lounge and turning off the internet at night. “For all the fact that the kids are 12 and think they’re going on 21, they’re still kids.”
Murray is a huge advocate of “middle schooling”. Intermediates are no longer being built, but schools catering for Year 7 to 10 students are. He says these are best when organised as student-orientated rather than subject-orientated, as at a secondary school.
Over the years he has noted a national decline in mathematics performance, due, he says, to both weaker teacher skills in the subject and what he believed was a flawed primary curriculum approach from the 2000s.
Murray’s own early specialities were in maths and physical education.
At 66, he is Takapuna Rugby Club captain and still coaches. He lives in Milford with long-time partner Pam Penberthy, a former school dental nurse he met when she was on the board of trustees. Between them they have six children and 13 grandchildren. So, when he does retire, caring for kids will still be part of his days.
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