Primary schools accounted for almost eight in 10 stand-downs and suspensions handed out for physically assaulting school staff last year, according to Ministry of Education figures released under the Official Information Act, and the number of students disciplined for hitting staff is now 46 per cent higher than it was in 2022.
The figures were obtained and reported by 1News on Saturday, alongside the account of a teacher who says a five-year-old in her new entrant class hit her while she was pregnant, and again after she came back from maternity leave.
The teacher, identified only as Teresa, has taught primary school children for 25 years and says she has been physically assaulted by four different students in that time. One incident left her with injuries that followed her home.
“I got really quite badly bruised ribs one of the times,” she told 1News. “I had a little baby, of course, and I couldn’t pick up this little baby.”
Extra help was put in place for the child, and Teresa said it made a real difference at first. Then the support was wound back because the boy was doing better.
“This child was starting to do quite well, but because he was meeting goals, they took some of the funding away, and it all started to unravel,” she said.
She described trying to take the boy outside to calm him down during one incident. “And then he was just banging, banging, banging, hitting me, and so I’m there by myself, and I actually shouted out for help.” Another teacher heard her. Teresa is no longer in a classroom full-time, and says she is now “a lot more picky about the support I’ll get” before she takes on work.
She does not blame the boy or his mother. “That kid needed help. The mum was trying to get help,” she said.
The ministry recorded 1,469 stand-downs and suspensions for physical assaults on staff across all New Zealand schools in 2025. Of those, 1,160, or about 79 per cent, were in primary schools. The sharpest movement was among the youngest children in the system. Among pupils in Years 1 to 3, the combined figure rose from 330 in 2022 to 639 in 2025, an increase of almost 94 per cent.
Those numbers come with real caveats and the ministry is blunt about them. They count disciplinary actions, not individual children and not every assault. The same child can appear more than once. Schools vary widely in how they respond to the same behaviour, so a stand-down in one school may be handled without one in another. Incidents that do not end in a stand-down or suspension are not in the count at all. The ministry says the figures reflect how schools respond to behaviour rather than how much of it there is.
Ministry of Education deputy secretary Geoff Short said the rise was worrying and that officials did not have an explanation for it.
“We’re really concerned that we’ve seen that increase in stand downs, reflecting an increase in physical assaults on staff and we don’t know what’s behind it,” he said. Later in the same interview he acknowledged the limits of the data, saying it “doesn’t necessarily reflect what actual behaviour may be occurring in schools”.
Arakura School principal Tute Mila, whose school is in Wainuiomata, in Lower Hutt, said more five-year-olds were arriving with high and complex needs and that specialist help was hard to get in time. What schools wanted was another adult in the room.
“We need real action at the chalkface. We’re really desperate for funding to have teacher aides in every classroom,” she said. Her school could sometimes provide one-on-one support, “but it’s never enough for a whole day”, and was drawing on its own resources to fill the gaps, which she called “completely unsustainable”.
Education Minister Erica Stanford pointed to the learning support package in last year’s Budget. “Of course I’m concerned and that’s why we put $750 million into the learning support budget,” she told 1News. Budget 2025 committed $645.8 million in operating funding and $100.9 million in capital for learning support, including learning support coordinators for all schools with Years 1 to 8 pupils, more specialists, and a build-up to more than two million extra teacher aide hours a year from 2028. Much of that is still being phased in, and teachers have been telling reporters for more than a year that they have not yet felt it in their classrooms.
The staff assault figures sit inside a bigger and more mixed picture. Separate Official Information Act data reported by Newsroom in August showed the total number of primary school students stood down fell for a second year running, from 8,334 in 2023 to 7,191 in 2025, while stand-downs caused by physical assaults on other students crept up over the same period, from 3,631 to 3,661. In secondary schools the same pattern held, with total stand-downs down and assault-related stand-downs up from 4,512 in 2023 to 4,818 last year. Schools are standing down fewer children overall, but a larger share of what is left involves someone being hit.
Physical restraint, which the ministry says is a last resort to prevent imminent harm, has been reported more than 9,300 times since new rules took effect in 2023, an average of about 15 a day. Auckland accounted for 23 per cent of restraints last year and Canterbury 20 per cent.
What to do about it is now contested. ACT has campaigned on giving teachers an explicit legal power to direct a disruptive student out of the room, with protection for staff acting in good faith and fines of up to $3,000 for parents who skip meetings triggered by an assault. Leader David Seymour told Newsroom the point was to back teachers, saying “disruptive children will be able to return to the class just as soon as they agree to respect their peers’ right to learn”.
Counsellors and principals have pushed back on the framing rather than the problem. New Zealand Association of Counsellors president Huhana Pene said the issue was resourcing rather than discipline. “You can stand a child down for hitting someone, but that doesn’t fix why they hit them,” she said. Porirua principal Lynda Knight said “the safest classrooms are not created through stronger punishments, they are created by understanding how children’s brains develop, addressing the causes of dysregulated behaviour, and equipping schools with the resources needed to intervene early and effectively”.
There is at least one worked example. Wesley Intermediate in Auckland spent four years training staff to understand how children’s nervous systems respond to stress rather than simply managing behaviour. Principal Rachel Ward-McCarten told Newsroom violent incidents dropped from about 50 in 2022 to about five so far this year, regular attendance rose from below 20 per cent to above 60 per cent, and achievement in reading, writing and maths each rose by more than 20 per cent.
Teresa says she hopes the boy who hurt her got the help he needed. “No kid deserves that. No kid does deserve that. No parent deserves it either,” she said. For her, the failure was never the child. It was the system around him.
Have you taught in a New Zealand classroom, or had a child in one, where behaviour got beyond what the school could handle? Tell us what did and did not work 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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