Children in Gisborne with the highest learning and disability needs will get a specialist school in their own town for the first time, closing a gap that has left the East Coast without one for as long as the schools have existed.
Education Minister Erica Stanford announced the school on Wednesday, saying it should be ready for students by the start of Term 1 in 2028 and would be built for up to 54 children. It will have four teaching spaces plus resourcing and administration space. Two extra satellite teaching spaces will go on the shared site of Te Wharau School and Ilminster Intermediate School at Inner Kaiti in Gisborne.
“We’ve listened to parents and the local community, and we know how important it is to provide local options for children with high and complex needs,” Stanford said. “These students deserve fit-for-purpose classrooms where they can learn and thrive.”
Until now there has been no specialist school serving Gisborne, Wairoa or the wider Tairāwhiti region, the official name for the East Coast district. The nearest one is in Napier, more than 200km away by road down State Highway 2 over the Wharerata hills. Stanford said families and young people had been “left with buildings that weren’t fit for purpose or had to travel long distances to get to a school that catered for their needs”.
Specialist schools take students who qualify for the highest level of learning support in the state system. They are not the only option for those students, and most do not use them. Ministry of Education figures show 12,129 students were funded through the Ongoing Resourcing Scheme as at 1 July 2025, about 1.4 percent of everyone at school, with 9,244 assessed as high need and 2,885 as very high need. Roughly a third of them attend a specialist school and the rest are in mainstream classrooms with support built around them.
The Gisborne Herald reported that the base school will sit at Gisborne Boys’ High School, with the satellite classrooms at Te Wharau and Ilminster. About 60 community members and students turned out for the announcement, among them Gisborne Mayor Rehette Stoltz, East Coast MP Dana Kirkpatrick and Special Education Principals Association president Maureen Poulter.
It is the third specialist school announced in the past year. The first two were confirmed in late January, one at the Queen Elizabeth College campus in Palmerston North for 36 students from as far away as Bulls and Dannevirke, opening in Term 2 next year, and one beside Ngākōroa School in Drury in South Auckland for 54 students, opening at the same time as the Gisborne school. Those two together were costed at about $40 million.
What makes the run of three unusual is how long the gap has been. All three are the first specialist schools built in New Zealand in nearly 50 years. The last one to open was Hamilton North School in 1977. Everything since has been done by adding satellite classrooms to existing schools, shifting rolls around, or asking families to travel. The two announced in January take the national total to 29. Gisborne will make 30.
Demand has not stood still in the meantime. Education Counts roll projections put the specialist school population at 7,174 in 2025 and forecast it to reach 8,058 by 2035, a rise of about 12 percent, at the same time as the overall school roll is expected to fall. That count covers day specialist schools, sensory schools, regional health schools, Oranga Tamariki schools and residential schools.
Stanford said the Government has committed nearly $295 million over the past two years to expand capacity and upgrade facilities in specialist settings. That has funded an extra 122 specialist classrooms nationally, upgrades to six existing specialist schools, and $90 million for learning support modifications, which includes changes made to mainstream school buildings so students with access needs can use them.
The building programme sits inside a longer argument about where disabled children should be taught, and the Minister has not been shy about which side she is on. At the January announcement she said that for too long the country had decided every child should be in a mainstream school whether it suited them or not, and that “inclusion is a choice”. The point she keeps returning to is that families should get to make the call rather than have it made for them.
Not everyone in the sector agrees that new buildings are where the money does the most good. IHC, which advocates for people with intellectual disabilities, argued back in 2024 when the specialist school money was first set aside that it would reach only a small share of disabled learners while the much larger group in ordinary classrooms waited. “Families and whānau are having to beg for support within a broken system,” IHC inclusive education lead Trish Grant said at the time. “Polarising mainstream versus special schools doesn’t take us forward,” she said. “Let’s build a system where all disabled students and their schools are supported at the political and systems level to have what they need for a world-class education and a real chance at a good life.”
That tension is not really about Gisborne, where nobody appears to be arguing the region was well served. It is about what happens to the students who will still be in mainstream classrooms in Ruatoria, Wairoa and Te Karaka after 2028, and whether the therapists, teacher aide hours and specialist teacher time follow them there.
There is also the ordinary problem of getting a school built and staffed on the East Coast, a region that has spent much of the past three years repairing roads and bridges after Cyclone Gabrielle. Term 1 of 2028 is 18 months away. Chrissy Marshall of the Northern Health School, who was at the announcement, put the caution plainly to the Gisborne Herald. “It’s one thing to announce funding and support in an election year and another to see what it will look like on the ground.”
For the families who have been driving to Napier, or deciding they could not, the announcement is still the first change in their direction in a very long time.
What do you think? Should the next round of learning support money go into new specialist schools or into the mainstream classrooms where most disabled students already are? Leave a comment 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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