The Green Party has blown the whistle on secret talks aimed at boosting enrolments to the country's three residential special schools.
Photo: RNZ / Rebekah Parsons-King
RNZ revealed last year the schools were paid for about four times as many students as they actually had, resulting in per-student funding they themselves described as ridiculous.
The schools claim they are being deliberately starved of enrolments but critics say there are better ways of helping children with learning and behaviour problems.
The government is spending $10.3 million on the schools this year for a national roll of 84 children, but they only had 20 at the middle of March, resulting in a per-student funding rate of more than $500,000.
That sort of mismatch has been happening for years because the Education Ministry is increasingly helping children in their own communities and is referring fewer children to the schools.
But now it is talking about loosening the enrolment criteria.
Green Party MP Teanau Tuiono said the proposed changes should be debated in the open.
"The consultation period for the proposed changes is alarmingly short and have specifically avoided being made public which doesn't allow the appropriate organisations and community members to have their say and suggests they're trying to sneak something through that they know that they shouldn't," he said.
He said most people with disabled children did not want to send them away.
Associate Education Minister Jan Tinetti denied the talks were secret.
She said she asked the ministry to look at options for enrolling children who might benefit from a spell at one of the schools and it was holding targetted consultation with disability and education groups.
"The Ministry of Education is just trying to ensure that they can get good advice back to me within a timeframe. I'm looking to have advice back to me by the end of April. Maybe we need to go further than that at that stage but we're on a timeframe here, this has been going on for a long time now, we need to have some conclusions pretty quick I think."
She said the over-spending on the schools had to stop and she acknowledged there were strong and opposing views about the schools' future.
"I've heard from parents who think it's a great thing, I've heard from disability groups who have reservations about it but I want to see what the hang-ups are and I want to see if there is a way that we can put the learners' needs at the centre, and if that's the case that it's going to be the best for them, what are the opportunities to improve the access for those learners," Tinetti said.
The chair of the boards of trustees for Westbridge and Halswell residential schools, Dave Turnbull, said the schools should have more students because they were effective for most of the students that attended.
"We're seeing a significant number of kids back into mainstream learning situations or mainstream schools, we're also seeing significant development in the students in terms of social and environmental skills," he said.
Turnbull said he hoped the new criteria would be in place in time for the start of term two in May so the schools could accept more students.
"We're not talking about hundreds of students going to be enrolled in residential specialist schools, it's still a small number compared with the total number of children who are in schools in New Zealand but it does serve a need," he said.
A parent and long-time advocate for children with disabilities, Bernadette Macartney, said the government should not be trying to keep the schools going.
"They should be spending the funding that is being invested at the moment in those schools in the regular system so that families with disabled children and disabled young people can be educated alongside their peers in their local communities," she said.
Macartney said the schools' rolls had declined because the ministry was providing more wrap-around support to children in their own schools and homes.
"The fact that the rolls of the residential schools have been declining over the last 15 years is a good news, success story for the government, not a reason to turn their policy around and start trying to fill them up again," she said.
She said the schools provided much-needed respite for some families, but there were better ways of doing that.