At this school, Māori children, primarily Ngāi Tai and Ngāti Paoa, but also from other surrounding iwi, were taught reading, writing and arithmetic.

[1] Following the Ngāpuhi raids of the 1820s and 1830s, tensions persisted between Waikato, Auckland, and Hauraki tribes, and the land between the Wairoa and Tāmaki rivers had not been reoccupied since the 1821 exodus, due to fear of conflict.

The Christian Missionary Society, who desired to establish a mission station somewhere within the Tāmaki isthmus, sought to find a resolution.

The chiefs that sold the land ‘received as return for that land Tamaki, ninety blankets, twenty-four axes, twenty-four adzes, twenty-six hoes, fourteen spades, eighty dollars, nine hundred pounds tobacco, twenty four combs, [and] twelve plane irons’, followed by a payment in instalments of £902.

[14] The mission station buildings were made from raupō, and timber framing was reused multiple times over, as Fairburn travelled across the Northern region.

According to Fairburn's letters to the Church Missionary Society, during their first year of operation, in 1837, the mission school had an average attendance of thirteen girls and fourteen children.

Māori students at the school typically wore European clothes, and alongside reading, writing, and arithmetic, were also taught agricultural and domestic skills.

[1] The wife of Surveyor General Felton Matthew visited the mission school multiple times, and on 4 June 1840, observed the Māori students alongside their teach, Miss Fairburn.

The work of native teachers differed to that of the European missionaries, as they provided Christian instruction in the context of the Māori lifestyle.

Between 1837 and 1841, Ngāti Paoa, led by Wiremu Hoete, crossed from Waiheke to Maraetai to attend Sunday mass, and made the return canoe journey on the following Tuesday.