In order to truly be mana-enhancing, you need to understand where students are at. While I saw one example of strong diagnostic use in an AE setting, educators repeatedly expressed to me that they were unsure how to assess starting levels of incoming students so that they could create work with appropriate challenge. This is compounded by the fact that in Alternative Education, new enrollments can happen at any time throughout the year, and students often begin school without teachers having received any background information from previous school sites.
As one teacher states,
“These students [have] often been disconnected from education for years. They've missed large chunks of education ... and I find that really tricky because you're literally just going on feels ...”
Need for better diagnostics
I consistently observed that AE teachers had developed fantastic relationships with students in which they could share lots about their personal life and ask for advice.
However, “[w]e know that relational change on its own does not bring about sustainable change in marginalised students’ educational outcomes” (Bishop, 2019, pg. 45).
According to Bishop, as seen in the graph below, the most effective teachers have high relationships and high teaching skills – to him, this is considered teaching to the North-East.
When working in AE with students who have a lot going on outside of school, this can be very difficult. It is a balancing act. As one teacher notes:
“I think...that one of our main goals is to build a whakawhanaungatanga...and as much as they are here to get an education, it's just important to know who they are as a person so that we can get the best out of them...so some days, the girls will come and they've just the worst night...and we know because we've built that relationship with them that OK, we're not going to push too hard for their work today. We're still going to push them a little bit because that's why they're here, right?”
In some settings that I observed, many teachers had strong relationships, but lower teaching skills or lower expectations for student work – teaching to the South-East, in Bishop’s words. In those spaces, students had great relationships, but weren’t receiving the instruction that they needed consistently or with enough rigor.
That being said, it is important to reiterate that balance is what will make this work, as moving away from relationships towards Bishop’s North-West isn’t ideal either. As one student said:
“Everyone’s in a different situation now. Like some people have a bad night and then come to school. Like some people really go through hell and then show up here and then are expected to do their best. But it’s like...we’re humans. And we’re not normal students. We’ve got a lot on our plates.”
Balancing relationships vs. academics
In talking to and observing educators, it became clear that they are certain government systems that don’t support the uniqueness of the AE model.
Examples include:
the new STEP attendance protocol, which does not take into account when mothers need to take days off to care for their sick children
government funding for childcare does not apply to girls who are in a partnership, even if they are in school all day and cannot work
activity centres can only serve until a student turns 16
data sharing processes do not occur consistently when students move schools, especially if they have been out of school for a while
Impractical government systems
“Currently, there is a pipeline of educational failure for disengaged young people” (Berkett et al., 2026, pg. 7).
Traditional secondary school structures are not serving all students.
Interestingly enough, the students who I spoke with are very aware of how they learn best:
“I can’t learn in the classroom like sitting and stuff...I have to talk to the teacher or something. Once I understand it, I like working alone...”
“I like working one-on-one with me and the teacher, and I don’t like it when people’s around...they can hear what the teacher is saying...because I feel like people think I’m dumb.”
“[You should be] able to choose the things you loved and things you didn't...so you could still stay in school and do the subjects you like and you wouldn’t be kicked out...”
Unfortunately, opportunities for these types of learning styles aren’t often available in traditional high school settings.
Traditional school structures