Kelston Boys’ High School: A Brief Context

Source: Google Maps

Kelston Boys’ High School has existed as a cornerstone of West Auckland education for decades.
It has produced:

• scholars

• tradesmen

• professionals

• artists

• community leaders

• athletes

• and fathers

It is a school where identity, culture, belonging, and brotherhood have always mattered.

Like all schools, Kelston has had challenges — but its strength has always been that it is defined by the community it serves, not by external interests.

Kelston is not just a school.
Kelston is a place of belonging.

Who Is BEWT?

The Bangerz Education & Wellbeing Trust (BEWT) is a private organisation proposing to take over governance of Kelston Boys’ High School and reshape it into an Auckland Sports College model, centered primarily around rugby league and high-performance athletic culture.

Their stated identity is built on the word:

“Banger: forceful and aggressive athlete.”

Source: https://www.bewt.nz

This is not a neutral descriptor.
It is a worldview.

Who Is Siaosi Gavet?

• Longstanding involvement in youth mentoring

• Father of professional rugby league player James Gavet

• Former Kelston Boys’ High School Board member

• Now leader of the trust proposing to take governance of the school

• Public work has focused largely on Pacific youth in sport

There is no question that he believes in what he is doing.

The issue is not his sincerity.
The issue is the scope.

A high-performance rugby identity framework is not an educational philosophy.

It is a pathway — and like all pathways, it works only for some.

Why This Matters

If a school’s identity, curriculum, discipline model, and governance structure are reshaped around a single pathway:

• futures narrow

• non-athlete students lose visibility

• academic pathways weaken

• university entrance becomes harder

• cultural identity becomes performance-linked

This is not an assumption.
This is what happens every time a sports-first school model replaces a community-governed one.

There is international research on this.
There is New Zealand data on this.

We will cover that in the next posts.

But for now, what is important to understand is this:

This is not a small change.
This is a change to who Kelston is allowed to be.