Paul Henry is out of his depth on school discipline — the real story is the government’s failure to properly fund Learning Support

ACT’s newest candidate has decided that the best way to lift education standards is to give teachers the power to physically remove children from classrooms, and to insult the children concerned while announcing it.

Speaking alongside David Seymour and Karen Chhour in Auckland this week, Paul Henry told reporters there are “a lot of little s***s in classrooms” and that clarifying teachers’ legal power to use “reasonable force” would fix the problem.

Let me be clear, So Listen up Paul, It will not.

This is a soundbite dressed up as a policy announcment, from a candidate who has demonstrated no serious engagement with why classroom disruption happens or what actually resolves it — and it lands at the exact moment the government’s own paper trail shows that Learning Support is starved of the funding, workforce and transparency it needs to do that job properly.

A policy built on a punchline, not a plan

Let me start with what Henry actually said, because it tells you everything about the level of thinking behind this proposal.

When asked to justify new physical intervention powers, his opening move was to insult the children the policy is supposedly designed to help.

That is not a rhetorical flourish — it is a signal of how ACT has framed the issue: not as a system failing to support children with additional needs, but as children failing to behave, requiring a stronger response from the adults around them.

Henry did offer a partial caveat, by acknowledging some students have genuine reasons for their behaviour, before immediately arguing that those reasons are “applied too broadly.” He did not say by whom, or on what evidence. That is the level of thought on display: a thought bubble tied to a punchline, with no data behind it, used to justify expanding physical force powers in classrooms.

The people who actually run classrooms do not agree with him. The Post Primary Teachers’ Association’s president was blunt: no teacher is asking for more physical restraint power, and the framing has uncomfortable echoes of corporal punishment.

A secondary school principal made the same point, but from the other direction — what schools are actually asking for is more learning and wellbeing support, more guidance counsellors, more mental health capacity in the community, they are not asking for a clearer legal pathway to drag a child out of a room.

Both Henry and ACT need to read the classroom over this issue.

Labour’s education spokesperson went further, warning the policy would let untrained staff physically restrain and remove students, making classrooms less safe rather than more orderly.

When the teaching profession, school leadership, and the opposition are all converging on the same critique — that this addresses a symptom while ignoring the cause — it is worth asking why a wholly unqualified candidate is out on a limb proposing a solution to a problem they appear not to have spoken with the sector at all about.

Henry has offered no engagement with the existing legal framework under section 99 of the Education and Training Act, no account of why current restraint provisions are inadequate beyond asserting that they are, and no costed plan for the “learning support room” his own policy assumes will be staffed.

This is a candidate performing toughness for cameras, not one who has done the work.

What the government’s own OIA record shows

That distinction — performance versus policy — matters more than usual right now, because I have spent recent months running exactly this question through New Zealand’s official information framework, and the record is damning in a very different way to how ACT wants the conversation to go.

Under GEMS-48418, I put a structured, multi-part request to the Ministry of Education covering the Learning Support funding methodology, the future of the Ongoing Resourcing Scheme, data on learners falling below current funding thresholds, and workforce capacity across Learning Support Coordinators, Resource Teachers of Learning and Behaviour, and teacher aides.

The Ministry’s response does not read like an agency confident in its own settings. On funding methodology, it unilaterally narrowed the scope of my request — answering only for operational grant funding under the Support for Inclusion Fund, while my request plainly covered staffing entitlements, specialist services, and centrally and regionally managed supports as well.

Those other funding streams simply went unaddressed, without a formal refusal ground being cited for doing so.

On workforce sustainability, a direct question about the department’s strategy going forward was answered instead with a history of teacher aide pay rates — a response to a different question than the one asked.

And where the Ministry did decline to answer, it leaned on a section 18(d) “publicly available” refusal that pointed to a general information webpage, not the specific operational guidance or cohort data actually requested.

None of that is what you would expect from an agency that has Learning Support well in hand. It is what you would expect from an agency that has not been resourced or held to account to explain its own funding model clearly, and that would rather narrow the question than answer it in full.

Why this matters, and what the alternative looks like

New Zealand has existing international commitments that Henry either does not know about and his policy does not engage with at all.

The Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities’ Concluding Observations with relation to Education, if properly implemented would deal with most of the concerns that Henry mentions in his press conference performance.

A genuine response to classroom disruption starts with clear, adequately funded supports; a workforce of Learning Support Coordinators, teacher aids and specialist teachers resourced to actually meet demand rather than ration it; and an honest, transparent account from the Ministry of how funding decisions are made — something my OIA experience suggests the Ministry is currently unwilling to give even when directly asked.

That is a harder story to tell at a press conference than “let’s toughen up on bad kids.” It requires investment, patience, and a government willing to be judged on outcomes over several years rather than a headline over a weekend.

But it is the approach that is actually likely to work, because it deals with the cause rather than addressing the symptom.

Paul Henry’s contribution to this debate has been a punchline about children and an unfunded, undetailed expansion of physical force powers.

The government’s own paper trail shows the real problem sits one step further back — in a Learning Support system that is under-resourced and, on the evidence of its own OIA responses, reluctant to be transparent about why.

Fix that, and you will do far more for classroom order than any change to who is allowed to put their hands on a child.