An unfortunate experiment

The Herald reports:

Education Minister Erica Stanford says the Government is ditching open-plan classrooms in favour of standard designs that “prioritise flexibility”.

Stanford said she had received overwhelming feedback from schools across New Zealand that open-plan classrooms were not meeting the needs of students. 

She made the announcement at Newlands Intermediate in northern Wellington, which is getting 10 new classrooms. 

“While open-plan designs were originally intended to foster collaboration, they have often created challenges for schools, particularly around noise and managing student behaviour,” Stanford said.

Modern learning environments are one of those things that sounded great in theory but turned out not to be great in practice.

The lesson fur future should be that any significant change should be tested thoroughly in the real world, before widespread implementation.