The Prime Minister is admitting open-plan classrooms, introduced under the previous National Government, haven't worked.
"Modern learning environments", introduced by the Ministry of Education under Sir John Key's Government in 2011, saw open-plan classrooms rolled out across New Zealand - but current Prime Minister Christopher Luxon said he wasn't convinced by them.
"That is increasingly our view - we don't think it has worked," Luxon told AM.
"Going forward, that is something we'll be looking at - what I hear from parents [and] what I hear from some teachers is it's difficult in those large teaching environments."
In 2022, the Ministry of Education faced questions about whether the initiative even worked - after a New Zealand Initiative report accused the Government agency of failing to provide evidence of such.
The report said the ministry "conducted no research on the effects" of modern learning environments on students' learning "prior to compelling schools to adopt them".
Some schools felt students were getting "lost in the system" of large teaching environments, Luxon said.
"That's not what we want to see so we're up for looking at that and, as we design new classrooms for the future and retrofit old ones, that's something we're up for looking at very, very closely - because I don't think the evidence is there for that."
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