Three Years of “In Principle”: What a Bundle of OIA Documents Reveals About New Zealand’s Stalled Path to Inclusive Education

In September 2022, the United Nations Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities delivered a blunt verdict on New Zealand’s education system:

‘It should stop investing in residential specialist schools, develop a plan to close them, and build a genuinely inclusive mainstream system instead’.

The Committee didn’t mince its words. It called some of these measures “urgent” and stated flatly that maintaining two parallel systems — mainstream and segregated — as “not compatible” with the right to education.

Three years on, a set of documents released to Disability Politics under the Official Information Act (GEMS-48585) lets us trace, almost in real time, how the Ministry of Education has responded.

Read together, the papers — dated October 2022, September 2023, and June 2024 — tells a story that is less about defiance, and more about drift: a Ministry that agrees with the destination in principle, repeatedly, while making decisions that keep the current system running and even building on it.

The Committee’s recommendations, arising from New Zealand’s second and third periodic review, fell into two connected buckets.

On inclusive education generally, the committee wanted a strategy to shift funding and resources out of segregated settings and into mainstream schools.

On residential specialist schools (RSS) specifically — of which New Zealand has three, at Salisbury (Nelson), Westbridge (Auckland) and what was then Halswell Residential College (Christchurch, since renamed Te Whānau o Ōtūmātua) the committee wanted an outright stop to new investment and a:

“comprehensive deinstitutionalisation strategy, with specific timeframes and adequate budgets, to close all residential institutions.”

The committee also wanted New Zealand to address the disproportionate number of Māori children with disabilities enrolled in these schools.

The Ministry’s own guidelines document, cited in these papers, is unambiguous: institutionalisation of children “constitutes a form of segregation, [is] harmful and violate[s] the Convention” — and disabled children and young people cannot meaningfully “choose” to live in an institution, so a lack of local support is no justification for keeping one running.

The Ministry’s first response, an Education Report to then-Associate Minister Jan Tinetti, recommended accepting the inclusive education recommendations “in full’, but explicitly declines to commit to closing RSS.

The stated reason was evidentiary: many families report RSS as their child’s first positive schooling experience, and “thin evidence and inconsistent experiences make it difficult to draw any definitive conclusions.”

The Ministry pointed to a University of Auckland research project, at that point still underway, as the thing that should resolve the uncertainty.

Tinetti’s handwritten annotation on the signed report is telling.

The Assoc. Minister agreed to the inclusive-education-strategy recommendation, and wrote that she felt the other recommendations were:

Having looked at all the evidence, including the now released University of Auckland report, there will be those who will want to criticise the Associate Minister for not acting to close RSS immediately, as a matter of principle, even before the Auckland University report came out, but I am of the view that it was the right thing to wait for the evidence before making a decision.

The University of Auckland’s Residential Specialist Schools Pathway Evaluation landed in mid-2023, and the Ministry’s follow-up report is more candid than the first. It found that:

• The Direct Access Pathway, introduced in 2018 to widen entry, hadn’t actually increased RSS rolls.

• Enrolment decisions were “inconsistently applied,” with families frequently unclear how or why decisions were made.

• Children and families experienced RSS enrolment as “hope” — often because local schools had already failed them repeatedly, not because RSS itself was uniquely necessary.

• Transition planning into and especially out of RSS was “poorly documented and/or poorly planned,” leaving families to “fend for themselves.”

• Rangatahi Māori remained over-represented, with no evidence of culturally appropriate process — no karakia, no provision for kaumātua, nothing tikanga-based in how enrolment meetings were run.

• The evaluation’s Māori engagement component failed entirely: despite efforts to interview whānau Māori, none proceeded to interview, a gap the evaluators attributed partly to tension between “Western ethical processes” and te ao Māori research preferences.

This is a fairly damning picture — evidence not so much of a beneficial residential option as of a mainstream system generating the very outcomes RSS is left to absorb.

And the Ministry’s own report says so plainly:

… Moving to genuine inclusion:

“would require major improvements in support systems and the inclusivity of local schools” and represents “a 10-year plus reform process.”

Yet the recommended response was still to accept the closure/deinstitutionalisation recommendation only “with modification” — meaning, again, not to build a closure plan but to fold the question into the long-running Highest Needs Review, with no timeframe attached.

The rebuild of Salisbury School — by this point already over-budget — continued into the detailed design phase.

So the Ministry had the evidence, in the form of the Auckland University Report and the response is more drift, the example is clearly illustrated above with regard to the rebuild of Salisbusy School.

The ministry kept going with a project that was already over budget when it had a report clearly stating that it should not continue to create segregated spaces.

By the third document, a network-planning paper, the picture has shifted in a way that makes future closure politically and practically harder.

RSS enrolments, which had fallen to a low of 17 students in 2021 following the introduction of an intensive wraparound alternative service, had climbed back to 40 across the three schools by mid-2023 — Salisbury alone reported 16 enrolments by September 2023, up enough that the Ministry concluded it was “no longer feasible” to even rescope the rebuild down to a smaller footprint, let alone toward closure.

The paper is explicit that continued investment in RSS is a “deliberately retrogressive measure” under the Convention’s framework.

A backwards step that would need to be “fully justified” — and yet goes on to recommend continuing the investment anyway, “while policy work... is underway.”

The paper also surfaces the sharpest normative language yet, quoting the UN Committee’s General Comment on Article 24, that inclusive education is;

“not compatible with sustaining two systems,” and;

New Zealand’s own Independent Monitoring Mechanism (IMM) calling for “enforceable rights” in mainstream settings “instead of expanding segregated settings.”

The Ministry cite their own 2018 internal data analysis, which found that students with high and very high needs achieved better educational and employment outcomes in local schools than matched peers in specialist schools.

This is about as strong a piece of evidence as a Ministry can produce against its own current practice, and it sat unpublished inside Ministry files for six years before surfacing through this document release.

The financial data released alongside these reports puts a number on the “retrogressive” investment.

Between 2022/23 and 2025/26, combined operational funding to the three residential schools alone totalled roughly $37–38 million, holding essentially flat or rising slightly year on year.

This for a system serving a few dozen children nationally, at institutions whose notional rolls (the numbers used to calculate funding) were, as recently as 2021, roughly four to ten times their actual enrolment.

On top of this, capital investment spiked sharply in FY2023/24 and FY2025/26 — including over $2.2 million in a single year for Salisbury’s rebuild — precisely the years in which the Ministry’s own papers describe that investment as inconsistent with the direction it says it is committed to.

Read end to end, these documents don’t show a Ministry rejecting inclusive education.

They show one that keeps agreeing with it, in writing, at every stage — while making a series of individually defensible operational decisions (don’t rescope a rebuild once rolls have risen; don’t close a residential option before local capacity exists; wait for more evidence) that add up to no structural change at all.

Each report ends with the same move: park the actual deinstitutionalisation decision inside the Highest Needs Review, a process that by 2024 still had no published timeframe attached to the RSS question specifically.

There’s a practical reality to speak about here — closing residential provision before local schools can actually deliver on inclusion would plainly harm the children currently relying on it, and the Ministry is right to say so.

But these documents also show why “wait for the evidence” can become a permanent state of being rather than a temporary or transition one: every year of waiting is a year in which new enrolments make the political and practical cost of closure higher.

Funding continues to flow into physical infrastructure whose long-term relevance the Ministry itself doubts, meanwhile the underlying problem — local schools failing the children who end up in RSS in the first place — goes unaddressed because it’s structurally slower and more expensive to fix than administering an existing residential network.

For New Zealand’s disability community and for Tangata Whaikaha Māori whānau in particular, the issue that connects all these documents is that the system continues to reproduce the outcomes the UN Committee required us to fix.

The over-representation of Tangata Whaikaha Māori tamariki, the “fend for themselves” transition experience, the near-total absence of Māori voice in the very evaluation meant to test the model — three separate times, three years apart, in each case treated as an established finding rather than a change trigger.

New Zealand isn’t due to report back to the UN Committee until 2030.

On the evidence of these papers, that report could largely be written today: continued acknowledgment of the problem, continued investment in a model the Committee said to defund, and continued deferral of the actual decision to a review process with no fixed date attached.

Over the past decade the Ministry of Education has spent approx $100-115m on maintaining Residential Specialist Schools. That is an enormous amount of funding.

The current roll of these schools is 84, Westbridge has 32, Halswell have 32 and Salisbury have 20. The Ministry of Education’s own internal documents show that these children would have a better educational outcomes from mainstream school with appropriate supports, and we are spending over $100m on maintaining these 3 schools, which the Ministry themselves say are not delivering for the children and the UN tell us to close.

I simply cannot understand Why someone at the Ministry hasn’t started on a plan to re direct that money to mainstream settings and alongside that a plan that transitions these children and their families to a mainstream settings over a 10 year period.

Every one of those 84 children deserves the opportunity to live the very best life we can provide for them, but at the moment we are failing them by continuing to believe the myth that putting them inside a guided prison is for their own protection.

This piece draws on Ministry of Education documents released under the Official Information Act (reference GEMS-48585, released 20 August 2026), including Education Reports dated 13 October 2022, 6 September 2023, and 27 June 2024, and associated funding tables. Several documents relevant to this issue, including a May 2025 report on residential care in specialist schools, were withheld in full by the Ministry under section 9(2)(f)(iv) of the Act.