95bFM Concerns over establishment of charter school for autistic students
5 November, 2025
Interview by Joel Armstrong, adapted by Gabriel Timpson-Neill
The University of Auckland’s Missy Morton says the government’s announcement that a charter school will be established for students with autism avoids solving the actual issues autistic and other neurodivergent students face in the public school system.
A charter school for autistic secondary students struggling with traditional schooling will open next year, serving 96 students to start.
The school: Autism NZ Education Hub, sponsored by Autism New Zealand, will be available to students in both Auckland and Wellington, with Associate Education Minister David Seymour saying the school will utilise home, online, and community-based learning to facilitate students’ transition back to the classroom.
However, the establishment of this school has raised concerns with some that it is both taking away resources from already-struggling public schools and may not provide the best environment for autistic students to return to school.
Missy Morton, a Professor in Disability Studies & Inclusive Education at the University of Auckland, told 95bFM’s The Wire that while the current public school system poses challenges for autistic students, a specialised charter school would have its own problems.
“[The charter school] has far fewer accountability measures; they’re not required to have all of their teachers fully qualified, so there’s fewer quality assurances, they’re not required to use the New Zealand curriculum, [and] there’s far less accountability.”
Morton also highlights that the proposal for the charter school, which costs over $2 million, is already draining vital funds from the struggling public education system.
She says that while the establishment of charter schools within New Zealand has been a key policy focus for the ACT Party for a long time, charter schools themselves are only a “seductive idea” which deflects from the public provision of education for all.
“It suggests that the way to fix a system that’s broken or not working is to allow people to run their own school. So it’s kind of like a marketisation of the education system, and the marketisation of schools.”
Morton also questions the need for such a specialist school to be set up in the first place, saying that it is unnecessary with the existing state schools that serve students with autism and other disabilities.
She is also concerned that students with multiple disabilities, such as those with both cerebral palsy and autism, may not be included in the charter school’s criteria.
Morton adds that such a specialised charter school, while perhaps able to provide for the educational needs of the students, misses a key purpose of what makes the public education system so important.
“One of the roles of schools must be to build our communities, and to teach what it means to participate, and who belongs in school, and who we expect to see in our communities. So schools build inclusive communities, not just furthering segregation and isolation.”
She says that instead of establishing a charter school where autistic students could be disconnected from their community, there should be a stronger focus from the government on teacher assessment and professional development, as well as support for whānau that is grounded in New Zealand values.
She adds that this function is already being served for many autistic or neurodivergent students through correspondence schools, like Te Kura, which has the highest enrollment rate of disabled students of any school in the country.
While the charter school has been stated to be set up primarily for autistic students who are outside of the public school system, Morton says there is no clearly defined mechanism as to how this new proposal will get these students back to school.
“The goal according to Autism New Zealand’s website is that the students would go back to school but they don’t say which school, they don’t say how they’re supporting the school these students were at… Will they be better off when they come out? We don’t know.”
