When parents avoid something in a school, you know it’s a bad idea – Heather du Plessis-Allan

New Zealand is ditching open-plan classrooms in favour of single-cell learning, following years of criticism from parents and educators. Photo / 123rf

THE FACTS

• Education Minister Erica Stanford announced a return to single-cell classrooms, which is expected to be popular.
• Schools like Shirley Boys High and Rangiora High have spent significant amounts reinstating walls in classrooms.
• The move addresses concerns about open-plan classrooms, which have been criticised for causing distractions.

It’s been eight months since I last wrote this column.

Since then – three days before Christmas – a lot’s happened. We’ve had a summer break, I had a baby (little girl, adores being carried, everywhere), three months’ maternity leave, come back to work, she’s marked six months and cut four teeth, and it’s now the dead of winter.

My boy now sleeps in a bed, not a cot. He hardly ever sits in a pram anymore and we’re about six months away from having to choose which primary school he goes to.

That decision comes around faster than you ever imagine it would. But it’s actually not really a decision. We’re sending him to the only local school that still does single-cell classrooms.

His best friend at kindy is going to the same school, for the same reason. And if my conversations with other parents are anything to go by, this is widespread.

So, I would imagine Education Minister Erica Stanford’s announcement that the country is going back to single-cell schooling will be popular. And overdue.

It’s been obvious for years now that open-plan classrooms are a failed idea. Shirley Boys’ High has spent $800,000 putting walls back up. Rangiora High School – once the poster child of open plan – has spent $1.5 million doing the same. Silverstream School in Wellington has also done it. Reports have been written. Principals have admitted they’ve changed their minds.

Some of these schools have a right to feel a bit annoyed. For a while there last decade, the Ministry of Education forced them to take open-plan classrooms if they wanted money to build.

It was a financial decision. It’s cheaper to build one big classroom than it is to build three smaller ones.

It was also ideological. You’ll find open-plan classrooms are often loved by the same people who love whole-word teaching and student-centred learning and any one of the other silly ideas born in the 1970s that have contributed to our declining education standards.

It was also bonkers from the start. Common sense would dictate that kids learn better when it’s quiet. Fewer distractions equal greater concentration. Every. Single. Parent. Knows. This.

We also know boys need fewer distractions to learn. We also know neurodiverse kids really struggle with lots of noise, movement and stimulation. So doing the opposite is beyond baffling.

We’re learning now that adults suffer in open-plan workplaces if there’s nowhere quiet to go to concentrate. So, if it’s true for adults who’ve had decades to learn to discipline their minds, how much truer is it for kids who haven’t?

Some teachers love it. It gave them the opportunity to learn from watching other teachers work. It unfortunately also gave some the opportunity to freeload on another.

Some defend open plan as a good idea done badly. Maybe they’re right. Maybe it works brilliantly when teachers have been adequately trained, and the floor space is perfectly laid out and big enough. Maybe it works in Scandinavia. But it doesn’t work here. And a good idea done badly is just a bad idea for the generation of kids sitting in that classroom.

Credit to the minister for not swinging wildly from one ideological position to the other. Schools that still want to do this can ask for an exemption. Classes will be built with sliding doors to switch from open plan to single cell.

But mostly, credit to the minister for calling time on an experiment that failed a long time ago.

In the absence of evidence one way or the other, just follow the parents. When parents actively avoid something in a school, you know it’s a bad idea.