Erica Stanford has had a lot on her plate in her first year as a Minister. In her education portfolio, she has set a cracking pace, with work well underway on a knowledge-rich curriculum for primary and secondary schooling. She is also the Minister responsible for the government’s response to the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in Care.

There is an intersection between these two areas of responsibility. The harrowing findings of the Royal Commission included accounts of abuse in residential schools for young people with intellectual, sensory and physical disabilities. Some of the abuse amounted to torture, as Prime Minister Christopher Luxon has acknowledged.

Following the Royal Commission report, there have been calls to close New Zealand’s three residential schools.

It is easy to understand those calls. Children with disabilities are amongst the most vulnerable members of society. Most residential school staff are strongly motivated to help children with high needs thrive. However, as the Royal Commission report shows in graphic detail, a few take advantage of the cloistered environments of state institutions to indulge in sadism.

Even so, Minister Stanford is not rushing to close the residential schools. Instead, she has asked the Education Review Office to conduct annual reviews and the Ministry of Education to increase its oversight of them. She has also announced a programme to assess the investment required to better support students with special educational needs. There are two obvious places for such investment.

One is in initial teacher education programmes. The three residential specialist schools are the tip of an iceberg. A further 27 non-residential schools educate around 4,000 students with high needs and there are many more such students in mainstream schools. Teachers must be prepared better to teach young people with neurodiverse conditions. They also need better training in basic classroom management. Neither of these things currently receive much focus in teacher education programmes.

The other is to provide schools with much better access to specialist support. Schools frequently wait months even to get a child assessed for a learning disability. When a diagnosis has been made, the resources schools receive to support neurodiverse students are often woefully inadequate.

Even a well-run institution is not a great place to live, much less to grow up in. But to successfully integrate the young people who live and learn in residential schools, mainstream schools must be equipped to meet their needs.