Allen has been agribusiness curriculum director at St Paul’s Collegiate School in Hamilton for the past three years.
It is thanks to her efforts the college pioneered New Zealand’s first secondary school agribusiness course.
It has in part been funded by some larger corporate names that have recognised the value in having keen students entering tertiary agri-business education and leaving with employable skills.
It also means she has been able to develop a curriculum that can now be replicated around the country for years 12 and 13 students keen on a primary sector career.
For Allen a lifetime teaching agriculture and developing curriculum comes from a solid family background in both.
Allen’s mum is a teacher and she grew up on her parents’ sheep and beef farm near Rotorua while an inspirational biology teacher at high school pointed her in the direction of agri sector teaching.
The lure of setting up an agribusiness curriculum from scratch drew Allen to St Paul’s from teaching agriculture at nearby Hillcrest High.
The school’s agribusiness teaching hub includes a sponsorship wall listing some gold-plated sponsors for the course, including the hub building itself funded by agri-tech firm Gallagher.
Scattered among the likes of DairyNZ, Beef + Lamb and corporate names are a number of high profile Waikato farming families with ties to the school who were keen to support efforts to keep agriculture on the to-do list for their following generations.
“Agriculture and horticulture, as subjects, have long been staples in school curricula. But what we wanted to do with the agribusiness course was take it beyond the farm gate, building their knowledge in a way that encourages them to go to the next stage, tertiary study in the sector.”
Her efforts have been timely in a sector crying out for processing, marketing and technology skills, arguably more than for farmer workers.
Whether it is horticultural, forestry or pastoral, every sector is expecting an ever-tightening skills supply that goes well beyond the seasonal staffing shortages already being experienced on orchards, forests and farms.
The kiwifruit sector alone has an extra 700ha of SunGold coming on stream every year and another orchard manager is required for every 50ha. They need to hit the ground with tertiary level training and knowledge to oversee orchard establishment and management.
The needs come in the context of increasing technical specialisation and technology demands that tightly integrated harvest and supply chains need to run smoothly, through to marketing skills for competitive, sophisticated overseas customers.
“This course was the first time industry has gone to the education sector and said ‘you have not been meeting our needs so we have rewritten the syllabus so it does’.”
The agribusiness course brought a culture and curriculum change alongside the traditional ag and hort courses that were typically viewed as more within the farm gate type training.
“We needed the course to be a lot more multi-disciplinary, something schools do not always do very well.
“Agribusiness does not fit well into a school system, being that step beyond the farm gate into finance and marketing.”
Hands-on work in her curriculum includes value-add projects like creating a food product, branding it, developing a marketing plan and providing products for St Paul’s significant 350 boarding students.
She has developed a course that is replicable around the country regardless of the school area’s main primary sector income base.
Her Waikato focused curriculum inevitably contains a level of dairy content but also incorporates other land uses as pressure on dairy intensity starts to be factored into land use decisions.
“Marlborough may incorporate wine, forestry and mussel farming and Southland peony growing, for example.”
Allen’s original 10 lead schools that ran with the agribusiness course and now totals 80.
She is confident the course will achieve her target of 120 now she has help campaigning on it nationally.
St Paul’s has 102 students on the years 12-13 agribusiness course and six staff committed to the subject, both a significant proportion in a school with a roll of only 750.
For Allen, whose strong ties to the primary sector have been a lifelong commitment, the St Paul’s course has proved to be a professionally rewarding endeavour and one she hopes will reinvigorate teachers’ interest in committing to the primary sector.
“There has been no formal ag or hort training for 25 years.
“We are also working with teachers’ colleges to get it up as an option rather than it just being the position a teacher falls into when no-one else is there to do it.”
