Photo: RNZ / Richard Tindiller
An apology to a school from the Secretary of Education says the ministry was too slow to flag rising costs.
A copy of the apology letter last December from Iona Holsted to the board of Kaipara College has been released under the OIA to RNZ.
The school was promised a tech and arts centre would begin to be built this year after nine years of planning.
"I apologise to you, your board and the Kaipara College community for the handling of this decision," Holsted wrote on 4 December.
This was only after the college protested to the Education Ministry, Minister Erica Stanford and local MPs about the project being put on hold.
The letter shows officials kept the school in the dark.
"The high costs of the innovation centre project relative to other builds have been known about since early this year, and should have been raised with your board as a potential risk to the project at that point," Holsted wrote.
"Instead, the right level of scrutiny of these costs was not applied until late in the process, when the contract was about to be let.
"Because we did not engage with you on the issue earlier, as we should have, the decision to pause the innovation centre has understandably come as a surprise and a significant disappointment for your board and community."
Kaipara still needed investment in tech facilities, and the ministry and school were working on a revised project for the end of March.
Kaipara is one of 350 projects now in limbo, caught up in an overall review of school builds announced by Stanford on Monday.
Stanford has blamed the previous government for a school property system "bordering on crisis" and castigated officials for a pattern of over-promising and under-delivering.
Ministry guidelines state that the availability of funding for a project should be confirmed in the very first phase of a five-phase procurement process.