Ministry of Education spent a decade mandating the open-plan design it is now dismantling

A $31 million bill to undo a policy

The Government will spend a further $31.3 million converting open-plan classrooms, with work planned across more than 600 classrooms at nearly 90 schools. It is the second major tranche for the Modifying Open Plan Classrooms Initiative, launched at the end of 2025 and by June 2026 attracting 193 school registrations.

Strip away the education framing and this is a procurement and asset-management story. The open-plan classroom was not a rogue experiment. It was government policy, embedded in the Ministry of Education’s School Property Strategy 2011-2021, funded with public capital, and continued long enough that schools were still being built to the design well into this decade. The conversion bill is the direct, predictable consequence.

Built new in 2022, rebuilt in 2026

No case illustrates the waste better than Karamea Area School on the West Coast. It was rebuilt in 2022 as a modern open-plan learning environment, and is now one of six schools to have completed the first phase of conversion, with partition walls added to two main spaces. A four-year turnaround from build to rebuild.

Principal Tony Baird told RNZ “the noise and distraction was really challenging for the staff” and that the walls have delivered “a much better learning environment for our children simply because of a lack of distraction, less noise and less movement”. Education Minister Erica Stanford said that when she began visiting schools, teachers consistently told her how difficult it was to teach in open-plan classrooms, with parents raising strong concerns.

Not everyone agrees the walls are the fix. Lemonwood Grove Primary principal Blair Dravitski offered the sober counterpoint that “these walls aren’t magical, they don’t create automatic success”. And in July 2025, then-opposition leader Chris Hipkins argued the quality of teaching, not the size of the classroom, makes the single biggest difference. Both are fair points. But they do not change the fiscal reality of a portfolio that has to be built twice.

What the design ideology actually cost

The numbers are the story. Bespoke, architecturally designed open-plan buildings became the standard, and by the end of 2023 the average cost of a new classroom had reached $1.2 million, with projections it would climb to $1.8 million. The June 2024 Ministerial Inquiry into School Property found that complex procurement, bespoke design and layered authorisation processes were causing delays, overruns and unrealised expectations. Its recommendation was modular and standardised design.

This all sits inside a stretched balance sheet. The inquiry recorded a portfolio of more than 16,000 buildings and total assets above $30 billion, yet a $6.5 billion funding gap to complete 488 pipeline projects, with only 153 fully funded. Every dollar spent walling off a classroom built four years ago is a dollar not spent on capacity the system urgently needs.

The correction is genuinely working

Credit where it is due. The current Government stopped building open-plan classrooms on taking office, and by July 2025 formalised standard designs with sliding glass doors. The results are real. The average classroom cost fell to $620,000 in 2025, a 28 percent reduction from the end-of-2023 figure, and 30 percent more classrooms were delivered in the last year compared to 2023. The Ministry now delivers 93 percent of projects within budget, and Budget 2026 allocated $491.9 million of capex over four years for school property.

That is what disciplined, standardised procurement looks like. Cutting bespoke design out of the equation nearly halved the unit cost. Any business owner who has ever paid for a custom build over an off-the-shelf option understands exactly why.

The tail on a design fad is long

The unresolved question is scale. This round covers roughly 90 schools; 193 have registered. What happens to the rest, and does the conversion programme compete for the same constrained capital as new classrooms the roll growth demands? The Modifying Open Plan Classrooms Initiative is a correction, not a windfall.

The wider lesson for anyone managing public or private capital is the durability of a bad specification decision. A design fashion adopted in 2011 was still generating construction contracts in 2022 and is now generating demolition-adjacent contracts in 2026. Fads are cheap to announce and expensive to unwind, and the bill always lands on a budget that was already tight.

Sources

• Govt puts another $30m into scrapping ‘failed experiment of open-plan classrooms’ (2026-08-19)
• Nearly 200 schools sign up to put the walls back into open plan classrooms (2026-07-22)
• Classroom replacement programme gets underway (2026-07-22)
• Schools weigh in on open-plan versus traditional classrooms amid changes (2026-07-24)
• Karamea school backs return to traditional classrooms (2026-07-24)
• Government calls time on open-plan classrooms
• Report of the Ministerial Inquiry into School Property (2024-06)
• School property – Ministry of Education (Budget 2026) (2026-05-28)
• Education property – Ministry of Education (Budget 2025) (2025-05-22)
• From modern to modular: the revolving door of open-plan classrooms (2025-07-21)