Imagine a school having $800,000 in the bank. 

Imagine all the things a school could buy with that amount of money.  

This is a state school I’m talking about, not a Flash Harry private school that can put the call-out to the old boys and the old girls when it needs cash to do something.  

So a state school with $800,000 in the bank, and this state school has to spend that money fixing up a cock-up forced on it by the Ministry of Education.  

The cock-up I’m referring to is that disastrous experiment called the “modern learning environment” – where our kids have been the guinea pigs, forced into huge barns instead of your old-school single-cell classrooms.  

And the school I’m talking about, having to spend $800,000 of its own money to get out of this ideological nightmare, is Shirley Boys’ High School in Christchurch.  

Good on it for flipping the bird at the modern learning environment, but I think it’s crazy that the school has to dip into its own reserves to pay to sort it out.    

I know whether it’s the school that pays or the Ministry of Education that pays, it’s all pretty much taxpayer money. But the difference is Shirley Boys' is spending money it’s actually got in the bank, which could be spent on all sorts of other things. That’s why I think the ministry should be paying for this work.  

I’ve been anti this modern learning environment nonsense right from the outset. Which was pretty much straight after the earthquakes when schools in Canterbury needed rebuilds.   

And what happened is the powers-that-be jumped on the bandwagon and started telling schools that this is how it was going to be. That, if they wanted classrooms, they were going to be barn-like structures with up to 200 kids in them. 

To be fair, it wasn’t just the Government and the Ministry of Education forcing this one. There were some teachers and principals who thought it was a brilliant idea too.  

I’ve mentioned before how I was on the board of our local school for about six years, and they got sucked into the modern learning environment frenzy.  

In fact, they didn’t wait for new buildings. They had the caretaker knocking out walls left, right and centre every weekend, it seemed. And I thought it was nuts at the time and I still think the concept is nuts. 

As does Shirley Boys'. As does Rangiora High School, which did the same thing. It cost them even more – they spent $1.5 million turning their open-plan classrooms into single classrooms.  

But here’s what the principal at Shirley Boys', Tim Grocott, is saying about why they’re doing it. 

"The level of distraction was just too high. There was too much movement going on. They can hear what is happening in the class next door. Particularly if something was being played on TV or anything like that. So that level of distraction was a negative factor."  

He says the school did a formal inquiry into how the kids and the staff were finding the open-plan set-up and found that there was widespread unhappiness and so the school had no option but to do something.  

So it started the work during the last school holidays and will finish it during the next holidays.  

Tim Grocott says the changes that have been made so far have gone down very well.  

He says feedback has been “overwhelmingly positive and instantaneous”. I bet it has. 

He says: “The staff on the first day were absolutely thrilled. One of our teachers was hugging the walls in her classroom because she was so thrilled to have walls. The boys are just much happier too."  

Tim says he thinks that open plan classrooms are a flawed concept that just did not work for his school.  

Are they ever.   

And the Ministry of Education needs to admit that and needs to front-up with the money to pay back Shirley Boys’ High School for the $800,000 it’s spending to fix up this flawed concept, and elsewhere too. 

Or, more correctly, it needs to front-up with the money to pay schools back for the mess caused by this failed experiment. 

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