Damning report on residential specialist schools as minister seeks advice

A new report on residential specialist schools has been published on the Ministry of Education’s website almost 18 months after it was completed by University of Auckland academics.
The report, which was commissioned by the ministry, found that although the schools felt welcoming – “unlike many, if any, of their previous schools” – the transition out of the schools were poorly planned, leaving families feeling like they had to “fend for themselves”.
Māori were over-represented, and culturally appropriate practices were “largely absent”.
The report, which relied on anonymised administrative data and a small selection of interviews with former students and their families, found “deficit theorising” was apparent, and behaviour goals were often presented as the only learning.
“The findings in this report are largely consistent with 35 years of previous New Zealand government and independent reviews of residential schools and the seven reports and evaluations of related services undertaken close to the same time as this evaluation,” the researchers said.
However, the Ministry of Education has questioned the validity of the research, and have held off publishing the report for the last 18 months.
The report’s authors strongly contest the questioning of the findings and methodology, saying the ministry’s criticism was something people did when they didn’t like what the research uncovered.
At the same time, Minister of Education Erica Stanford is expecting advice back from the Education Review Office on whether the three residential specialist schools are fit for purpose.
Currently, New Zealand has three residential specialist schools, where 50 students aged eight to 15 with disabilities or very high needs live and learn for up to two years, away from their family and separate from the mainstream system.
Salisbury School in Nelson is for girls with disabilities, and Westbridge Residential School in Auckland and Halswell Residential College in Christchurch are for students with high behavioural needs.
Following the release of the report from the Royal Commission of Inquiry into State and Faith-based Care, Stanford asked the Education Review Office to increase its monitoring of the schools and provide her with advice.
That advice is due back in the next couple of weeks.
Newsroom understands Stanford has been particularly concerned with the two behavioural residential specialist schools.
An entire volume of the The watershed report is dedicated to the experiences of survivors who suffered abuse at residential schools for deaf people, and others with intellectual and physical disabilities recount the horror of their time spent at the ‘psychopaedic’ Kimberley Centre in Levin.
The report comments on the impacts of segregation on people with disabilities, and how these ‘out of sight, out of mind’ institutional environments increase the risk of harm being done to vulnerable children.
Since the report was released in July, advocates have renewed calls for shutting such schools. They say the Government should be working harder to equip the mainstream system in favour of sending kids to specialist schools.
These calls are in line with UN conventions, and come after the UN Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities recommended the Government shut the schools and direct funding to community-based support.
They also sit within the context of the previous education minister’s changes to the enrollment process in an effort to make it easier for students to enrol in these schools and lift rolls. And following news reports about how Westbridge and Halswell stopped reporting the use of restraint in their residences.
Meanwhile, Stanford is simultaneously working to reform learning support in the education system, picking up a piece of work started by the previous Government.
This latest report to question the validity of the schools and the reasons underpinning their continued existence comes after an earlier literature review, commissioned by the Ministry of Education.
That 2022 study looked at previous reports in New Zealand as well as comparable systems around the world, and found “thin evidence” underpinning the continued use of residential specialist schools.
“A persistent refrain in the literature about RSS and RSS-like programs is that there is a thin evidence base to show that this class of intervention is necessary, works, and specifically, which (if any) approaches work,” the literature review said.
“Even when studies report favourable outcomes for young people, the authors often question whether the intervention achieves efficacious outcomes that are sufficiently desirable when balanced with the associated risks and the costs involved.” 
The lack of funding, rigorous research and detailed data from the schools meant when there were positive outcomes, it was hard to know what had led to them and how to replicate this in other schools.
The researchers concluded it was unhelpful to look at overseas examples of residential specialist schools in order to inform New Zealand’s approach.
“Comparison of practices internationally feels like comparing apples, oranges, and pineapples. Drawing conclusions across contexts is a significant challenge.”
So, the Ministry of Education commissioned a second, New Zealand-specific study in an effort to capture rangatahi experiences.
That study was completed by University of Auckland professor of disability studies and inclusive education Missy Morton, and her team, in June 2023. Morton has been perplexed as to why the ministry has refused to publish it until now.
But a lengthy note that accompanied the report’s publication on the ministry’s Education Counts website went some way to answering this question.
The ministry said “concerns were raised about some aspects of the evaluation methodology and the ministry conducted an internal review of the methods used”.
Specifically, the ministry was concerned that only a relatively small number of former students and their whānau were able to be interviewed (five students and 12 whānau); that the number of ministry student datasets analysed were small; and that the evaluation didn’t include Māori students as the researchers were not able to engage them and their whānau.
The ministry went on to say that the finding about transition planning both into and out of these schools being poorly documented, and/or poorly planned “should be viewed with some caution”, due to it relying only on ministry data and not the data held by schools.
“This is one of the things you do when you want to dismiss unfavourable things, right? You immediately talk about the credibility of the documentation or the evidence,” Morton said.
The researcher said the study was grounded in four sources of evidence, one of which covered the full cohort of students who had been through the schools.
Morton also pointed out that the design was agreed to and approved by the ministry.
In regards to the interviews, for example, it didn’t matter that they only spoke to five students and 12 whānau members, because it wasn’t about gathering a representative sample but about adding “nuance and depth to the administrative data”.
Morton said the ministry’s decision not to publish the report for so long “makes it look like there’s something to hide”.
She said she believed it was “a little bit consistent” with how discussions about care in residential settings had been conducted over time.
“Why isn’t it in the light of day?”
Morton said her research findings were consistent with other research carried out in New Zealand and overseas in recent decades.
Though families and students found these schools better than their previous mainstream schools, they were not presented with a genuine choice.
“It’s not families that are choosing schools, it’s schools that are choosing families – especially around disabled kids,” Morton said.
After enrolling in the school, students often experienced dislocation from their family and community, and the transition back into their communities took a toll on them and their families.
Morton noted that though the United Nations was calling on New Zealand to shut the schools, the country had gone in the other direction by creating new enrolment pathways under the previous Government.
In July, Paul Brown, a survivor of a specialist residential school for blind children in Scotland and a spokesperson for the Inclusive Education Action Group, told Newsroom funding should be directed towards making local schools more accessible, rather than increasing the specialist school network.
“Often [specialist schools] are a last resort when the mainstream hasn’t worked. And the mainstream hasn’t worked usually for lack of funding and/or lack of support,” Brown said.
“Nobody’s pretending that local schools are all great and that disabled kids are welcomed. They’re very variable, and the experience of disabled children and young people in mainstream settings is bloody patchy, to say the least,” he said.
“But that is always going to be the case if there’s an alternative to take kids out and put them in a specialist area.”
Although the oversight of specialist schools – particularly specialist residential schools that featured in the Royal Commission report – had improved, segregating someone from their family and society increased the risk of abuse and deprived them of the opportunity to be fully a part of society.
If New Zealand carried on down this path, Brown said he expected another royal commission in a couple of decades.