More than 8,000 students aged 12 to 16 are now learning outside mainstream classrooms, according to a new ERO report.
The figure has doubled over the past decade and includes around 6,000 students enrolled through Te Aho o Te Kura Pounamu. Roughly another 2,000 students learn via alternative education providers, activity centres, residential programmes, or engagement services. The trend reflects growing disengagement and increasing demand for non-traditional learning pathways.
The Education Review Office’s report paints a challenging picture of outcomes. Most students in alternative education make slower academic progress than their mainstream peers, and around four in five leave without achieving any NCEA qualification. Fewer than one in six return to mainstream schooling, and many experience delays of around three months before securing a placement in an alternative setting.
Fewer than half of staff working in alternative education hold a formal teaching qualification. ERO argues this raises questions about consistency, capability, and the ability of the system to support some of the country’s most vulnerable learners.
Learners from low socioeconomic backgrounds are overrepresented, and ERO found most students in alternative settings are Māori. The report also found that a small proportion of schools account for a large share of referrals.
A structural tension emerges, with schools that retain high-needs students often facing mounting behavioural, learning and wellbeing challenges while being judged against the same metrics as other less complex environments.
ERO is recommending that schools do more to retain at-risk students in mainstream education, while critics argue that new styles of school reporting could publicly disadvantage the very schools working with the most complex learners.
“Schools that hold on to young people with complex attendance, learning, behavioural, mental health and neurodiverse needs should be supported, not potentially punished through simplistic colour-coded ERO Report snapshots,” said AEC spokesperson Claire Amos.
