By Amelia Bury

When major education reforms swept New Zealand in the 1960s and '70s, Taranaki educator Don Taylor was ready for the cleanup.

At the time, he was aged 35 and the non-teaching principal of Waitara Central School - a town he had vowed never to teach in.

Don had been headmaster at Pihama School in coastal Taranaki, but left after a run-in with the school inspector and frustration over a half-finished school building project abandoned by builders for the winter.

"I nearly flipped my lid, I nearly blew up - so I did something which I said I would never do... I went to work in Waitara."

Not only did Don have a change of heart, so did the education system.

This era of dramatic transformation was also touching the north Taranaki town. "Waitara mushroomed, the population grew dramatically. It was a vigorous, growing vital community."

Borthwicks, the freezing works, employed more than 1000 people and New Zealand society at large was experiencing a more affluent lifestyle. "The concept of everyone owning their own homes was becoming quite real," Don says.

Waitara Central School was big - it had a roll of 444 pupils - but it was to grow in the following years to become the largest contributing school in Taranaki, with more than 600 children.

Let the teachers teach

However, the school had problems from the past - both physically and socially.

Because of this, Don soon realised that pastoral care was going to be a big part of his job. "I soon learnt there that my job was to make it possible for the classroom teachers to get on with their teaching and for me to take on to my shoulders the problems of the social setting that many of these children came from." 

He learnt that part of this involved some form of police work: "I found that I was doing some of their work as well as my own." So, Don rallied to get another policeman for the town, and was successful.

Waitara Central School students provide their own success stories.

"One's a volcanologist in California. Greg Pattern works in Houston, Texas, in the head office of one of the biggest oil companies in America. Peter Watt (features editor) at The Daily News is a good example of a Waitara Central student."

Baby boomers crowd classes

Again, Don had to deal with a teacher shortage at the school, where classes of 48-plus students were common.

"Staffing of our schools through the '50s and '60s and into the '70s was really a tremendous problem and it went back to the two wars, the Depression and the baby boom. That's what brought it all about."

Not one to sit and moan, Don mucked in when the Taranaki Education Board could not supply any more staff. "So for one term I did two jobs. I taught and was principal of the school with all the worries and concern I had for that."

One solution to the staff shortage was the "married women returners", who Don refers to as MWRs.

"We were so desperate for teachers that the government advertised for women who had raised their families and had been teachers, to come back into the job.

"At one stage I think we had four MWRs there."

These married women were returning to an education system that had changed dramatically. "It was quite a shock for them." Don says.

But a huge turn around was about to happen.

In 1973, Waitara Central finally got more teachers - a whole lot more.

"I think we were given something like about three or four teachers more than we had classrooms, so there were teachers who were teaching in corridors and porches," Don says.

Along with the teachers came the facelift of New Zealand's education system.

Changes afoot

"While I was at Waitara Central, the whole profession went through a retraining process," Don says, explaining how teachers attended in-service training courses in Auckland, Christchurch and Taranaki.

"It had been recognised that there were just so many teachers who had been trained for a system that belonged to the past."

Don believes this was one reason for his early promotion: "To bring a younger attitude and not perpetuate the things of the past."

The first change Don remembers was the concept of senior teachers having professional leadership responsibilities. Previously, this had meant that the senior mistress made a cup of tea for the staff at playtime.

Old terms were also out.

"No longer was there an infant mistress, because that job may have been held by a man. No longer was there a headmaster, because that position may have been held by a woman." New non-gender based titles were introduced - senior teacher, principal etc.

Don used this atmosphere of change to bring in some ground-breaking initiatives at Waitara Central. He divided his staff into teaching teams and they did a lot of work using themes.

"I used to be very keen on children getting out of the four walls, the box they were cooped up in, and trying to make the whole thing realistic and practical and relate it to life - one of my great beliefs."

Curriculum changes were also coming thick and fast.

"There were totally new approaches to the teaching of reading, which were just quite magnificent," Don says. This followed the new English scheme, the introduction of science as a subject, and "the new maths really swung into action when I was at Waitara Central, where we were classified as a special resource school in that subject."

One, two, threes

Don loved this new maths.

"Prior to then, teaching had been rote memory - two and two are four. Providing you could remember that and repeat it back, the teacher had succeeded.

"So the whole concept of mathematics changed to one of understanding what was going on. They started off by studying the number one."

As well as the belief in teaching students their one, two, threes, Don was strong on nurturing their ABCs.

The importance of the latter hit home when the teaching expert travelled overseas.

In 1975, his last year at Waitara Central, Don went to the United Kingdom on a Taranaki Savings Bank award to study education.

"It was an absolutely magnificent experience and probably the thing I learnt above all was why the newspapers reported that there were two million people in the UK who couldn't read.

"There was no teaching of reading as such in the majority of English schools. They weren't being taught to read. In many cases they were just being heard to read."

This trip made Don realise that the New Zealand education system was in good shape.

We have lift-off!

On his return, Don left Waitara Central, a school he remembers with special pride regarding the achievements reached.

In fact, he had to eat his own words.

"The parents were extremely supportive of what the school did at that time," he says. "Having been there I realised there was much more to it than meets the eye."

Don then became Principal at Highlands Intermediate, established in 1955.

Highlands Intermediate School

"The potential for pupil development in the intermediate structure is just unbelievable. It's like putting a jet-assisted take-off bottle on each kid and propelling them further forward."

One of Highlands' features was its outdoor education programme. The New Plymouth school, which backs on to the southern reaches of Pukekura Park, even had its own in-school campground.

Like Bryan O'Neill before him, Don fostered the events held in the great outdoors.  But he realises that sort of experience is gone forever. "You've got OSH (Occupational Safety and Health) for instance, and you don't dare do some of the things that we used to do because you could be liable for thousands if anything were to go wrong.

"It's extremely sad because things that were being done were just quite wonderful for our pupils and they thought it was great too. They used to get up to all sorts of mischief, but that's kids."

Don believes this part of education is just as important as the maths and spelling: "I sometimes used to say to the parents, 'If we can get the phys-ed, the art and the music right, then the reading, writing and arithmetic will all follow on very nicely'."

To foster outdoor activities and keep propelling these youngsters forward, Don introduced the Friday Morning Programme for electives.

"The thing that spurred me to do it was that I saw all these developing talents and there were problems in fitting everything into the time available."

Don ensured that all electives were based on curriculum subjects. "There were not to be any draughts clubs or chess clubs or Boy Scout groups. It had to be based upon the acknowledged syllabus of the school."

No spell from learning ABCs

These subjects included Spanish, art, music, physical education, outdoor pursuits and even spelling - Don took this himself.

He is unswervingly passionate about this particular subject.

"I was strong in the belief that the teachers should teach spelling. It had gone out of favour, and I said, 'This is a load of rubbish, you have to teach spelling and don't tell me it can't be taught because it can, I know, I've taught it and I was taught it myself and I can spell'."

Don also laid down the law regarding the popularity of outdoor pursuits.

"Of course half the school put their names down for this, with Ian Barry."

So Don made a deal with the students, saying: "You only get one go at this in your two years here because it's so popular, and the other thing is, if it's wet and there's thunder and there's lightening and you're down to do something outside, it goes ahead."

Don would live to rue this ruling.

"Boy did I live to eat my words. One day there was hail and the kids had been out on a run, there were tears in their eyes, the poor little devils!"

On a drier note, the musical side of the Friday morning electives could arguably be described as giving him his greatest sense of satisfaction and achievement. "Largely through the skill of Tony Hickling and other specialist teachers," he says.

Everyone deserves music

In true Don-style, he took on the Taranaki Education Board and won.

"So never having been one to bow to bureaucracy, I decreed that we would bring the very official out-of-school music hours into school time."

Instead of it being just for an elite group of children, he wanted music to be an option for every child in the school. "I wanted to give the kids the best opportunity I possibly could, and reach the maximum number that could be involved."

The only condition was that all the music pupils had to choose that subject for their Friday Morning Programme.

Music in schools is a big part of Don's teaching philosophy. "You watch a child playing a musical instrument and you will see that there is concentration, there is mastery of a skill, there is interpretation, there is the discipline of having to be part of a team and do everything in unison with everyone else in the orchestral setting and this is why I say that one of the basic subjects in education is music."

Don was at Highlands Intermediate for ten special years: "What I did at Highlands, along with a very strong staff, was sort of the peak - everything coming together. Although the maths programme that we developed at Waitara Central, the support for the children that needed help, that was important."

For Don, the children always came first.

"Some of the parents are a bit of a pain in the butt and some of the community are a pain in the butt, but the kids are great - they always have been and they always will be."

He is still outspoken about some of the conditions he was forced to endure: "The whole of my time in education, schools existed on the smell of an oil rag. We were beggars, we begged for money for our schools and half the time we were fundraising!"

Education export

When asked what he thinks about the New Zealand Education in 2003, Don is philosophical. "I'm not close enough to it other than to say my grandchildren have come through it pretty well.

"Some wonderful things are happening. Some children from New Plymouth have just gone so far in the world and have done so well."

He is sad that Taranaki teachers often don't see the fruits of their labour. "Taranaki exports a lot of its best (students) because we don't have the infrastructure here for a lot of our highly skilled and educated young people."

Still, Don is doing his best to help provide the literary foundations for New Plymouth children.

He has developed a programme called Reading Assistance in Schools, which he administers out of the Fitzroy Rotary Club. "I have a team of 84 senior citizens, most of whom each week spend one hour in a school. In that one hour they hear three children read, while the class teacher gets on with the actual teaching and they (the senior citizens) give individual support and attention."

The programme covers schools from Bell Block to Highlands, but Don is on the look out for someone to organise it in schools on the other half of the city.

Initially, Don believed this meeting across the generations would just benefit the children, but has found it to be a two-way winner.

"I sometimes wonder whether the senior citizens get more out of it than the children. If not, they get every bit as much out of it."

His eyes sparkle as he tells a related story. "Chris Greer (the principal) at Mangorei Road (school) told me how one day last year he was in his office and a boy raced down the corridor - and you don't run in the corridors apparently at Mangorei Road School. He went out, 'Come here boy. What are you doing running in the corridor?' 'Please Sir; I'm going to the man who's going to hear me read.' End of story."

In 1980, Don was honoured with the award of Fellow of the New Zealand Education Institute. To date, only 140 of these awards have been awarded nationwide. Puketapu School principal Allan Smith is the only other Taranaki resident to have been made a fellow. However, former Taranaki principal Lloyd Swanson also earned one. He now lives at Snell's Beach.

The award means a great deal to Don. "I was very proud of that. It was an accolade that put a stamp on the work I had been doing."