18 July 2025
From: Iva Ropati – Principal and Dr Clarke Raymond – Presiding Member of Pāpāmoa College
At our July Board meeting, we made a formal resolution to reconfigure our open-plan learning spaces into single cell classrooms.
The school was built in 2011 and was considered a Ministry of Education flagship school for modern teaching and learning. It was built purposely to accommodate large groups of learners in single shared spaces without any physical separation.
Our Board considers this current layout as a significant barrier to educational achievement at Pāpāmoa College.
The school completed its own due diligence over the past few years and, amongst other things, trialled relocating senior students from the open plan spaces into our temporary relocatable classrooms. This initiative has resulted in positive achievement outcomes for the students and the school.
As a consequence of shifting seniors into more private learning spaces we have seen a dramatic improvement in NCEA achievement for Y11 – 13 learners. Compared with 2020 Level 1 NCEA has increased from 63.5% to 82.4%, Level 2 from 67.5% to 88.3% and Level 3 from 66.4% to 74.2%. We are also experiencing much higher levels of student engagement and overall enjoyment of teaching and learning.
Our findings are consistent with the general consensus among NZ schools and the current government stance on all new classroom builds. We are now proudly amongst other high performing secondary schools in the BOP, and anticipate that our achievement results will continue to trend upwards as a result of changes to our learning environment in the future.
We plan to start construction to reconfigure classrooms this year and will continue until we have completed the conversion of all our open-plan learning blocks.
