Should a student refuse to leave the classroom, the party said it would be escalated to a “dean or senior leader” and continued refusal would trigger a mandatory parent meeting on the first occurrence.
The policy would allow school staff to use “reasonable force to remove the student from the classroom” if the student continued to refuse after the situation escalated.
Act said teachers would be protected if they intervened using “reasonable physical restraint where necessary to prevent harm”, which was consistent with the current legislation.
The law currently allows a school staff member trained and authorised to use physical restraint to “use physical force to prevent, restrict, or subdue the movement of the student’s body or part of the student’s body against the student’s will” if the student could cause imminent harm to someone else and there were no other options to prevent it.
The Act policy included mandatory stand-down or suspension for any students who assaulted other students, teachers and school staff. Should the assault cross “a criminal threshold”, it would be referred to police.
Parents would also be required to act under the policy. A parent or guardian would be required to attend a meeting on the first occurrence if their child was responsible for “violence, threats, intimidation or destruction of property”.
The policy said parents who didn’t engage would be referred to either the Ministry of Education, Oranga Tamariki or police.
The policy also borrowed from the school attendance scheme by allowing parents to be fined if they did not attend the meeting.
The fine would be up to $300 for the first offence and up to $3000 for subsequent offences.
“Parents may also be held financially liable for the cost of deliberate property damage caused by their child at school, recoverable as a debt if unpaid.”
Act argued for its policy using a 2024 Education Review Office report which found almost half of teachers reported spending 40-50 minutes per day “responding to challenging behaviour”.
The same report found half of teachers surveyed said student behaviour had a “large impact on their intention to stay in the profession”.
“Most students behave well and want to learn. They should not have their education held hostage by a minority who refuse to respect their teacher or classmates,” Henry said.
“We should not be pandering to the disrupters. We should be supporting teachers and education.”
Adam Pearse is the Deputy Political Editor and part of the NZ Herald’s Press Gallery team based at Parliament in Wellington. He has worked for NZME since 2018, reporting for the Northern Advocate in Whangārei and the Herald in Auckland.