By Dr Michael Johnstone

For most of the 2010s, if schools wanted funding for new classrooms, the Ministry of Education insisted that they build Modern Learning Environments (MLEs). These are large, open-plan classrooms, sometimes housing more than a hundred children and their teachers.

In 2022, The New Zealand Initiative published a report on MLEs. Its title was No Evidence, No Evaluation, No Exit, and that seemed to sum it up.

Well, the first two were right, anyway.

The main take-away from the report was that the Ministry pushed MLEs onto schools without a shred of evidence that they would improve education. Officials insisted that these shiny new classrooms would serve ‘student-led learning’ – another educational doctrine with little evidence in its favour.

Having forced schools to accept MLEs, the Ministry conducted no follow-up evaluation to see how they were being used. It undertook no study to find out whether students were really learning better than they had in traditional classrooms. Perhaps the officials didn’t want to know.

But, contrary to the title of the report, it seems that Modern Learning Environments do have exit doors after all.

On the day the report was released, in parliamentary question time, ACT MP Chris Baillie asked then- Education Minister, Chris Hipkins, why schools had to build them. Hipkins responded that they didn’t. And – just like that, it seemed – schools were suddenly free to replace their aging classrooms with new designs of their choice.

To be fair, it seems likely that Hipkins ended the requirement to establish Modern Learning Environments shortly after he became Minister in 2017. But Baillie’s question, prompted by the report, drew a definitive statement from the Minister, that schools could have traditional classrooms if they wanted.

But what of the many MLEs already established, having cost billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money?

Writing in the Waikato Times last weekend, journalist Bridie Witton reported that many schools are putting up walls to reestablish cellular classrooms. “A chorus of teachers assert [the MLE project] was an ill-informed gamble with young people’s education”, she wrote.

Yet no mea culpa has come forth from the Ministry. Just a bland assertion that, “We don’t impose … spatial plans on schools.” Not anymore, that is.

What a waste. And the expense of building unsuitable classrooms isn’t even the worst of it. The most outrageous cost has been to children’s educational opportunities.