As new charter schools open, we still know too little about how they worked last time

Seven new charter schools are opening their gates, and ACT leader and Associate Education Minister David Seymour – the politician responsible for their existence – has been singing their praises.

He says some will deliver “new and innovative ways to help students who are struggling at school to succeed, especially neurodiverse students, where there is huge need”.

Seymour also says charter schools will free teachers from “constant upheavals in education” policy and provide the flexibility to “allow them to better cater to students who are priority learners” – the term charter schools use for “those with neurodiversity and a background of disadvantage and poverty”.

Such innovation will raise overall educational achievement, he says, particularly for students who are underachieving, disengaged or neurodivergent. It may be too early to tell whether this optimism is justified, but it seems the new charter schools will enjoy a range of benefits unavailable to state schools.

For example, Seymour recently praised Arapaki School in Christchurch for its teaching ratio of one teacher and three teacher aides for every 25 students. Australian students with this level of resourcing, he said, learned up to 60% faster than those in state schools.

But teachers, principals and researchers in the state system have been asking for reduced class sizes and one teacher aide per classroom for years. So we need to ask why the resources and privileges being channelled into charter schools can’t be made available to the state school system instead.

An underfunded education system

The coalition government has set aside NZ$153 million to fund charter schools over the next four years. These schools are state funded but operated by a “sponsor”: 75% of their teachers must be qualified and 25% can be permanently employed with a “limited authority to teach”.

The government’s Charter School Agency describes considerable flexibility around teaching, curriculum, governance, hours and days of operation, and how funding is spent.

According to chief executive Jane Lee, this flexibility supports innovation and provides opportunities for students to learn differently. And there is little doubt a sizeable minority of pupils are not well served in the mainstream system.

One in five children and young people in our schools need extra support for their learning. For decades, official reports have documented inequities in this area, including poor achievement for disabled and neurodivergent students.

The problems and solutions are well understood. Disabled and neurodivergent students face barriers to learning because funding, resources and timely support for them and their teachers are inadequate.

This includes a shortage of teacher aides, specialist teachers and therapists, and class sizes being too big.

Many teachers try to compensate for these challenges. But research undertaken for the New Zealand Educational Institute warns that without the extra support they can come close to burnout. A damning 2024 report from the Education Hub described the experiences of neurodivergent pupils, their whānau and teachers who viewed

the current education system as outdated and heading towards major crises, with many seeing home schooling as the only option.

Lack of supporting evidence

Rather than addressing under-resourcing in the state system, however, charter school advocates view the problem as a lack of choice, exacerbated by constant upheavals in education policy.

So, what can we learn from the last time charter schools operated between 2012 and 2018? The evidence is mixed, according to an evaluation of eight charter schools undertaken for the Ministry of Education.

While whānau and student experiences appeared positive, low and uneven response rates from these groups make drawing any conclusion difficult.

There was evidence of innovative practices in school governance and management, and to a lesser extent in staffing, student engagement and support, teaching and learning. The schools were least innovative in curriculum design and engagement with their communities.

The schools themselves felt small school rolls and class sizes contributed to their successful operation. As for the key aim of charter school policy supporting priority learners, the report described a good understanding of their needs.

But insufficient data mean we don’t know whether student achievement improved overall, and we know nothing about the achievement of students who received learning support.

Focus on state schools instead

Other questions remain, too. As the New Zealand Educational Institute pointed out last year, the $153 million being spent on charter schools would pay for more than 700 teacher aides in the state system.

Given the existing shortage of learning-support resources overall, will charter schools (which will also have access to those resources) simply add another layer of competition for state schools?

And if charter schools themselves struggle to recruit the necessary expertise, will their staff have the professional knowledge of student diversity and inclusion that’s needed to support students and whānau well, and who will judge that?

Finally, charter schools must select priority group applicants by ballot if there are more applicants than capacity allows. How will they decide on the number of available places?

At the risk of answering these questions with another question, wouldn’t our thinking be better directed at improving the public education system?

All children – including those needing learning support – deserve to belong and learn well in their local school, with all the checks and balances that currently ensure equity, inclusion and a fully qualified teaching staff.