ERO Alternative Education Report - A system that asks schools to hold on, then punishes them when they do
And why the curriculum and assessment reforms won't help either
The latest ERO report on students learning in alternative settings should be a wake-up call for government, agencies, ERO and the wider education system.
The report paints a deeply concerning picture: more young people are becoming disconnected from mainstream schooling, too many are waiting months for alternative provision, and far too many are leaving without meaningful qualifications or pathways.
But the report also exposes a bitter irony.
ERO is recommending that schools do more to retain at-risk students in mainstream education, while at the same time introducing a new style of school reporting that risks publicly disadvantaging the very schools that are doing exactly that.
Schools that hold on to young people with complex attendance, learning, behavioural, mental health and neurodiverse needs should be supported, not punished through simplistic colour-coded snapshots.
If a school keeps enrolling, welcoming and working with the students other places have pushed away, its attendance and achievement data may look more complex. That should be understood as evidence of moral purpose and community commitment, not treated as a reputational liability.
It is obvious that ERO’s new school reports, with upfront visual judgements on attendance, progress and achievement, risk creating perverse incentives. Schools may feel pressure to protect their public profile rather than take on the hardest work. This is especially troubling when ERO’s own report identifies that existing accountability settings can make it easier for schools to exclude, refer or discourage high-needs students than to provide the intensive support they require.
The report is clear that students entering alternative settings are not simply “choosing not to attend”. Many have experienced poverty, trauma, housing instability, bullying, neurodivergence, unmet learning needs, mental health challenges, stand-downs, suspensions, non-enrolment and repeated school moves. Māori students are significantly over-represented. These are not individual failures. They are system failures.
ERO’s Alternative Education Report report also sits VERY awkwardly alongside the government’s wider education reform agenda.
ERO is calling for flexible, intensive, relationship-rich provision that keeps young people connected to learning. Yet the government is pushing through a more standardised, subject-bound senior curriculum and the removal of NCEA, the one qualification framework that, while imperfect, has allowed schools to design flexible and responsive pathways for diverse learners.
This is a fundamental contradiction.
You cannot say you want to re-engage disconnected young people, while simultaneously narrowing curriculum, reducing assessment flexibility and building a system around sameness. The young people in this report are telling us that one-size-fits-all schooling has already failed them. The answer cannot be even more one-size-fits-all schooling.
In the AEC report, Still Beyond Capacity: Learning Support in Aotearoa After the 2025 Budget, launched last month, which found that despite major government announcements, schools continue to experience no meaningful shift in learning support resourcing. The funding gap has not closed. ORS access and adequacy remain constrained. The “missing middle” of students with significant but not threshold-level needs remains unsupported. Workforce capacity has not increased in any way that schools can consistently feel.
What ERO is describing in alternative education is the downstream consequence of a system that has failed to resource inclusion upstream.
Schools are holding together complex needs through goodwill, sausage sizzles, grant applications, exhausted teachers, underpaid teacher aides and senior leaders becoming full-time crisis managers. Then, when the system finally looks at the outcomes, it risks blaming the school.
The solution is not more shame, sharper surveillance or prettier dashboards. It is proper resourcing, better support and accountability that recognises and highlights context.
Schools do need to be accountable. But the system also needs to be accountable to schools. If we want mainstream schools to retain more students, then we must resource them to do so. If we want alternative settings to provide high-quality learning, they need qualified teachers, proper funding, strong pathways and wraparound support. If we want young people to belong, then belonging must be designed, funded and valued.
In response to all of this, AEC says the government must resist the temptation to treat this as another behaviour, attendance or compliance problem. It is a resourcing, equity and system-design problem.
AEC’s ARC Recommendations in response to the ERO report
A: Account for context, not just outcomes
ERO and the Ministry must ensure school reporting fully contextualises attendance, progress and achievement data. Schools serving high-complexity communities, retaining at-risk learners or accepting students who have been excluded elsewhere must not be publicly penalised for doing the work the system claims to value.
A: Align accountability with inclusion
Accountability settings should reward schools for retaining, re-engaging and supporting students, not create incentives to refer, exclude or avoid enrolling young people whose needs may negatively affect public-facing data.
R: Resource mainstream schools before disengagement becomes entrenched
Every school should have timely access to learning support, mental health support, counselling, teacher aides, specialist services and behaviour expertise. The current model expects schools to absorb costs that properly belong to the system.
R: Resource the “missing middle”
Students with significant learning, behavioural, emotional or neurodiverse needs who do not meet the highest thresholds for support must receive sustained, flexible and responsive resourcing. Waiting until crisis point is both morally wrong and fiscally stupid.
R: Resource alternative settings as education settings, not holding spaces
Alternative Education, Activity Centres, Te Kura’s Engagement and Wellbeing gateway and Residential Care learning provision must be funded to provide high-quality teaching, meaningful curriculum access, recognised qualifications and coherent pathways.
C: Create flexible curriculum and assessment pathways
Any senior secondary reform must preserve flexibility for schools to design responsive, culturally located, vocational, project-based and strengths-based pathways. Removing NCEA while narrowing Year 11 risks undermining exactly the kind of learning these young people need.
C: Connect agencies around the learner
Education, health, housing, Oranga Tamariki, youth justice and community providers must be required to work together around young people, with clear responsibility for transition planning, information sharing and sustained support.
C: Centre belonging, relationships and mana
The young people in ERO’s report need more than attendance plans and behaviour policies. They need adults who know them, curriculum that matters, pathways that make sense and schools that are resourced to keep saying: you belong here.