The Ministry of Education says it will add 641 new classrooms this year. Photo: 123RF
The Education Ministry has warned the government that new schools and classrooms are urgently needed in high-growth areas.
A briefing paper from April said 139 schools were over 105 percent of their classroom capacity with in-zone students only, and parts of Auckland and Canterbury had critical unmet demand.
It said a roll bulge was moving through secondary schools and last year migration brought an extra 20,800 school children, 10,400 of them in Auckland.
The ministry told RNZ it would add 641 new classrooms this year including some for roll growth and some for new schools with 307 of them for Auckland schools.
"In Auckland, 97 teaching spaces have been funded through Budget 24 for urgent roll growth with the intent to be delivered before the start of Term 1 2025. Twenty-five of these teaching spaces are expected to be delivered this calendar year and are included in the 307 forecast total teaching spaces. The other 72 teaching spaces are intended to be delivered at the start of next year and before the start of the academic year," it said.
The ministry's paper showed building was focused on areas with the highest need.
"Affordability challenges have shifted the focus of network planning to the delivery of additional student places at schools and in catchments where the growth is the most pronounced (scale), immediate (urgency), intensifying (rate), and where there are limited or no other options available to manage school networks," it said.
The briefing warned that postponing new schools could create overcrowding at existing schools in high-growth areas.
The briefing said Ormiston in the south-east of Auckland had the second-fastest rate of school growth at 13 percent between 2021 and 2023.
It said there had been more housing development than expected and the number of children moving in has been double the normal figure putting the area's entire network of schools over capacity.
Among them, Ormiston Senior College which was built for 1100 teenagers but was now at 1400 and growing.
Principal Tim Botting said the school, which only enrolled students from Year 11, not Year 9 like most secondary schools, grew by 200 students in each of the past two years and it was running out of room.
"Some areas that traditionally haven't been taught in, like our library and our cafe, have now got classes in them, basically every space in the school's got students in it all the time, so that's the main thing we've had to do and we've had to remove a couple of benches and reallocate some different settings in different areas to use our hallway spaces a little bit better as well to make sure we've got overflow capacity in that area."
The school was losing its only sports field to 10 temporary classrooms with a further 10 due before the start of next year, he said.
Ten more temporary classrooms could be added late next year while permanent classrooms were under construction.
Botting said the growth put pressure on more than just teaching space.
"We've got more teachers than we've got carparks already and that's going to increase next year as well. And the other impact is on the infrastructure of the building itself so when you've got buildings that are designed to have capacity of 1200 students and you've got 1400 students in there, the water pressure drops because of the amount of flushing that goes on for example, the amount of water that's used," he said.
The inflow of new migrant students had slowed, but based on previous years' experience there was likely to be another influx in July, Botting said.
Principals in Rolleston near Christchurch had been talking to principals in Ormiston because their town was the now the fastest growing area at 14 percent in the past two years.
Lemonwood Grove School principal Blair Dravitski said the school had grown from 59 to 900 pupils in the eight years since it opened.
He said the growth had been exponential and it was still going.
"We've had 177 enrolments already this year and we have another 97 pre-enrols before the end of the year. It's a really big challenge because the kids don't all arrive like most schools at [age] five. Last year we had 37 new Year 7s arrive that we didn't know were coming so all of our class ratios we had to start really low to manage that roll growth."
As of last week the school was in the unusual situation of having enough classroom space thanks to the completion of permanent classrooms that took its capacity to 1100, a figure that included four prefab classrooms and a portacom.
"We're flush with space for a short period of time. We had no staffroom for two terms, we haven't had a library for four years because we just currently have always got kids in those spaces."
Dravitski said he had already noticed an improvement in children's behaviour since the new classrooms opened and the school now had room for more furniture.
"Because we had so many kids in spaces we had to tone down the furniture because the spaces became over crowded with not only children, but with furniture," he said.
Dravitski said school building projects had generally not kept up with growth in Rolleston and local principals were hoping another school would be built soon to meet growing demand in the south of the town.
Nearby Halswell on the south-west edge of Christchurch was also growing fast.
Knights Stream School principal Mike Molloy said he convinced the ministry to bring forward stage two of the school's building programme, meaning the school had 554 children and, since last year, capacity for 700.
The ministry now expected the school to take 750 pupils, which would require yet more classrooms, and on current form the roll could grow to 800, he said.
He said some developments in the area were housing more children than expected.
"There might be two or three families living in a home or there are homes in some areas of town that are more apartment-style homes but there are families living in them. They weren't really probably designed as family homes but that's where people are living," he said.
Molloy said immigration was driving a lot of the area's growth.
"We're about 45 percent New Zealand European, we're about 20 percent Indian, we're about 14 percent Chinese. You put a pin in the globe you'll find someone from that nationality here."