The country’s largest school for children with special needs has closed its roll, saying years-delayed plans for a school rebuild have forced its hand.
The plans to rebuild Panmure’s Sommerville School weren’t on the list of 20 paused school building projects released on Tuesday. The Ministry of Education says the project is not on hold – rather it is working to refine and complete the design ahead of tendering and construction.
Nevertheless, increasingly sporadic and then cancelled fortnightly design meetings, communication from delivery partners and the years its taken for the project to get off the ground have school leaders wondering if that’s just semantics.
“The absence of substantial progress over an extended period is evident, regardless of whether we label it as on hold, paused, or delayed,” wrote school board members Paul Vickery and Angela Hood in response to the ministry saying there was no pause.
“Delays in our rebuild are nothing new to Sommerville. We’ve been through this process time and again for the past 20 years but enough is enough.”
The two said the school was onto its fourth delivery manager since the official announcement of the rebuild in 2018 without ground being broken.
It’s a situation that has left parents and teachers worried about the future for children with special needs approaching school age – not to mention students at the school still dealing with classrooms in poor condition.
“The rebuild has been promised for around 20 years,” school principal Belinda Johnston said. “In the meantime we’re in buildings that are crumbling, with falling ceiling tiles and black mould.”
With a student body with a high prevalence of respiratory illness, concerns are only heightened.
Johnston sent out a letter to parents on Monday updating them on the situation and urging them to write to the Ministry of Education and local MPs to express their disquiet.
She said while the roll freeze did not affect the more than 350 students currently attending the school, the school board had to make the decision to not accept any new enrolments for the foreseeable future.
Johnston said the Ministry of Education had acknowledged the need for new facilities over a decade ago. The official first movements towards a rebuild came in 2018, when Labour announced $17 million to redevelop Sommerville School, which had occupied the facilities of the shuttered Tāmaki Intermediate School since 2013.
A spokesperson from the ministry said it had not ‘paused’ the project, but was “working to refine and complete the design ahead of tendering and construction”.
In response to the building quality, it said the school had been funded to fix such problems.
“Schools receive funding to support them in the management and improvement of their property. The school’s property project manager is currently investigating possible solutions to remediate two areas where mould has occurred,” they said.
“The ministry will work with the school and their property project manager to ensure any health and safety risk is removed and the area remediated to avoid reoccurrence.”
In a visit to Sommerville, then-associate education minister Tracey Martin said the funding demonstrated the government’s commitment to supporting special education and ensuring all children were able to access the facilities they needed.
“We are prioritising new spending to remove barriers to young people’s access to education and learning,” she said.
“We want to ensure every child with learning challenges has access to the tools and professionals they need. We know that learning support funding has been inadequate for more than a decade.”
But in the nearly six years since, Johnston said the ground had yet to be broken on a new set of classrooms to serve the special needs kids of a catchment area spanning much of the eastern half of Auckland.
In a letter sent to Ministry of Education director Jason Swann, parents asked for the Sommerville rebuild project to be made a priority, for clear and transparent communication regarding the timeline and reasons for any delays, and a dialogue between the ministry and school community.
“The current base site buildings are unsafe, outdated, not fit for purpose, and are more of a hazard than a haven for learning minds,” the letter read.
The parents contended the ministry had expected students with complex disabilities and medical needs to learn in sub-standard buildings.
“This creates an unhealthy learning environment, potential safety hazards and limited opportunities for learning and development of my child. The delay in the rebuild will further exacerbate these issues, leading to declining student performance, reduced enrollment, poor staff morale and an overall negative impact on the community.”
Recently, plumbing issues forced the closure of two classrooms before the beginning of term one, meaning some students weren’t able to start school until a week later.
Johnston said these students were still housed in temporary spaces around the school even less suitable for their needs while the school awaited quotes, insurance claims and repairs.
“These students are the most vulnerable in our school, with profound and multiple learning disabilities and complex medical conditions,” she said. “We’ve had to purchase a portable air conditioner as these students must have strict temperature controls due to their lack of mobility and seizure management plans.”
The standard of school properties has been under the microscope this week, with Minister of Education Erica Stanford announcing a ministerial inquiry into the pausing of property works.
“The coalition Government has inherited a school property system bordering on crisis,” she said.
“There have been a number of cost escalations and some schools expecting exciting, bespoke building projects that are not able to be delivered on.”
The ministry recently paused 20 building projects, and said up to 350 projects at various stages had not met expectations.
Stanford said the ministry’s approach to delivering classrooms and school buildings was not working.
“Shortly after I became the minister, I learned that Kaipara College had been told that their planned innovation centre had been paused. This news came just a week before the school expected that construction would begin,” she said.
“It was disappointing to learn about the poor communication with the college given that the decision could and should have been made with the school many, many months earlier.”
Meanwhile, other schools had experienced cost blowouts on the price of delivery.
“It’s not unusual to have isolated examples of projects that experience delivery challenges, but this is of an unprecedented scale,” Stanford said.
A ministry spokesperson said since September 2023, a number of projects had been paused while more cost-effective options were explored or because the expected roll growth had not occurred or forecast growth changed.
“A small number have also been paused while we determine their relative priority to other investments to make sure that we are responding to the highest and most immediate needs of our schools.”
But the Sommerville School saga does not feature on the ministry’s list of 20, which mostly consists of schools slated to expand in response to roll growth.
Half of those listed are in Auckland.
Johnston said rapid roll growth had been an issue at Sommerville as well, with the student population expanding by about 60 each year.
