Nearly 200 schools have put their hand up to have walls built back into open plan teaching spaces, and six have already had the work finished, Education Minister Erica Stanford said on Wednesday.
In a statement released on 22 July, Stanford said 193 schools registered for the Ministry of Education’s Modifying Open Plan Classrooms Initiative, which opened at the end of 2025 and invited boards to apply to have partitions and permanent walls reinstated in large shared teaching areas.
As of June this year the Ministry had completed assessments at 46 of those schools, the first step before any building work is scheduled. Six schools have finished their modifications, and Stanford said at least 38 will have had work done by the end of the year.
The six completed so far are Beckenham Te Kura o Puroto in Christchurch, Foxton Beach School, Horotiu School near Hamilton, Karamea Area School on the West Coast, Levin East School and Nelson College for Girls.
“Teachers say there is less noise and fewer distractions, stronger student concentration and engagement, and more flexibility in how they teach,” Stanford said of the schools that have had walls put back.
“Quieter classrooms also better support neurodiverse learners and students who need calmer learning environments.”
She also said children “cannot be expected to learn well when surrounded by noise and distractions”.
The initiative is the practical end of a policy shift the Government announced a year ago. On 16 July 2025 Stanford said the Government would stop building open plan classrooms altogether, and that all new classrooms would instead use standard designs with sliding glass doors so spaces can be opened up for group work or closed off for quiet lessons. The Ministry has since stopped funding new open plan builds.
That announcement also carried a cost argument. The Government said the average cost of a new classroom had dropped to about $620,000 in 2025, down from roughly $1.2 million at the end of 2023, a fall of 28 percent, and that 30 percent more classrooms were delivered than in the previous year. Ministers have consistently linked the retreat from bespoke open plan designs to that saving, arguing standard designs are faster and cheaper to build.
Open plan rooms, marketed for years as modern learning environments or innovative learning environments, were rolled out across the school property portfolio from the early 2010s. Two or more classes would share one large space, often with two or three teachers working together, and the design was pitched as better suited to collaborative teaching and to students moving between activities.
The rollout was never matched by strong local evidence. Reviews of the international literature have repeatedly found little to show that open plan design lifts achievement on its own, and researchers have pointed out that the New Zealand rollout ran well ahead of any evaluation of what it was doing to students. Writing in The Conversation last year, education researchers noted that school design has swung between open and enclosed layouts several times since the 1970s, and that each swing has been driven as much by fashion and budget as by evidence.
Teachers had been raising problems for years, particularly noise, the difficulty of keeping a class settled, and how hard it was to notice a student quietly falling behind in a room holding 60 or 90 children. Parents of children with sensory sensitivities or attention difficulties were among the loudest voices asking for walls.
The scale of the fix is still modest against the size of the system. There are roughly 2,500 state and state integrated schools in New Zealand, so 193 registrations is a small slice, and it is not clear how many more schools would take up the offer if capital was available. Not every registration will end in a building job either, because the assessment step decides whether walls can be added without compromising fire exits, ventilation or structural loads in buildings that were designed without internal partitions.
Cost is the other constraint. Putting walls into a space that was purpose built without them is not simply a matter of framing and plasterboard. It usually means new lighting, heating and ventilation runs, extra doors, and in some cases relocating services in the ceiling. That is why the Ministry is working through the queue in stages rather than funding all 193 registrations at once, and why the assessment phase is taking longer than the building work at some sites.
The announcement lands in an election year, and school property has become one of the more reliable applause lines in education policy. Reversing open plan classrooms is unusual in that it enjoys broad support among teachers and parents while also being framed by the Government as a cost saving, a combination that is rare in the sector. The harder questions, on operational funding, teacher supply and the state of ageing school buildings, are still in front of whoever wins the election. If you are weighing up where the parties stand on education and everything else, you can compare their policies with the NEWS WIRE voting tool.
For the six schools already finished, the change is more immediate. They range from a small area school on the northern tip of the West Coast to a large city secondary in Nelson, and the same policy applied to both, which is that the room shapes the lesson, and that after roughly 15 years of experimenting the country has decided it prefers doors that close.
What do you think, was the shift to open plan classrooms a mistake, or is putting the walls back an expensive overcorrection? Tell us in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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