Reasonable force will not make classrooms safer
By Berne Peters, National Manager – Kaitiaki Services, CCS Disability Action
Published 17 August 2026
No teacher should be hurt at work. No disabled child should be hurt at school. An Act policy proposal announced this month would let school staff use "reasonable force" to remove disruptive students, and bring in automatic stand-downs and fines for parents (NZ Herald). It moves us closer to neither goal.
The legal power to restrain a student already exists. What schools are short of is not power. It is trained people, specialist support, and time.
The powers already exist
Section 99 of the Education and Training Act 2020 already allows physical restraint as a last resort to prevent serious harm. The Ministry of Education sets clear rules and guidance on minimising physical restraint, including how each incident must be recorded and reviewed. Schools also have de-escalation, individual support plans, restorative practice, stand-downs, and suspensions available to them.
So the honest question is not whether schools have enough authority. It is whether they have the capacity to use what they already have well. In our experience they often do not. Learning support is stretched. Specialists are hard to reach. Waiting lists are long.
Adding a new force power does not fix any of that.
Automatic consequences remove the judgement children need
The proposal goes further than restraint. It would make stand-down or suspension automatic where a student assaults a teacher, a staff member, or another student. It would fine parents who miss a required meeting, starting at $300 and rising to $3000 for repeat non-attendance (NZ Herald).
Decisions about stand-downs, suspensions, and exclusions currently sit with Boards of Trustees, who weigh each case on its facts. That discretion matters. It is what lets a school ask why a child behaved the way they did, whether their support needs were being met, and what would actually help.
Behaviour is complex. Automatic consequences treat it as if it were simple.
Disabled ākonga will carry the cost
This proposal is not aimed at disabled children, yet they will still be among the most affected.
Government reporting under the Disability Action Plan confirms that disabled learners are already over-represented in stand-downs, suspensions, exclusions, and expulsions.
The reason is not that disabled children behave worse. It is that disability-related behaviour is often read as defiance. A student who is autistic, who has a communication difference, who is overwhelmed by noise, or who is responding to trauma may look non-compliant.
The impacts will not be felt evenly. Special schools and satellite units generally have specialist kaimahi, adapted environments, and established behaviour supports. Mainstream classrooms often do not. The children most likely to be removed are the ones with the least support around them.
And what about those children with no formal diagnosis? Assessment waiting times mean many tamariki go years without one. They already miss out on support, and they are already judged. A rule that removes discretion will reach them first.
Fines will fall on the families least able to pay
The financial parts of this proposal mean that parents would be fined for missing a required meeting, and could be made personally liable for property their child damages.
Set that against what we know about household income. Stats NZ figures for the year ended June 2025 show the median equivalised disposable household income for disabled people was $44,262. For non-disabled people it was $57,346. Households with a disabled member make up nearly 40% of all households in the lowest income quintile.
The pattern holds for children too. Ministry of Social Development research found that children in households with a disabled person account for just over half of all children living in material hardship.
These families also carry extra costs that others do not. Equipment, transport, therapy, and reduced hours in paid work all add up. Research commissioned by the Ministry of Social Development describes disabled people and their whānau going without essentials to cover disability-related costs.
A fine is not a neutral incentive in that context. It is a much heavier penalty for a household on a low income, and those are disproportionately the households raising disabled children.
It also assumes that missing a meeting is a choice. Often it is not. It is a shift that cannot be dropped, no transport, no care for other tamariki, or another appointment for the same child on the same day.
Charging a family for damage caused during a moment of distress the school was not resourced to prevent shifts the cost of an unmet support need onto the people least able to carry it.
Teacher safety is important. This is not the answer.
Teachers are not imagining the problem. The Education Review Office has documented high and rising levels of classroom disruption. That is an important working environment issue and it deserves a response.
But the people closest to it are not asking for this. PPTA president Chris Abercrombie described the proposal as "a solution looking for a problem" and said no teacher had asked him for the power. NZEI Te Riu Roa said schools need behaviour specialists and more classroom support, not physical restraint powers. The Education Review Office's own recommendations point to building behaviour capability and investing in support.
There is also no good evidence that physical restraint reduces difficult behaviour. It might manage a moment. It does not change what caused it.
What we want instead
The status quo is not working consistently. Some schools do inclusive practice very well. Others still rely on punitive approaches that undermine disabled learners' rights and their education.
Five things would make a real difference:
Fund learning support properly. Every school needs reliable access to behaviour specialists, psychologists, and classroom support. This is the single biggest gap.
Train teachers in disability-inclusive practice. Initial teacher education and ongoing professional learning should build real confidence in understanding and responding to disability-related behaviour.
Fund timely assessment and early intervention. Support should not depend on a diagnosis a family cannot get.
Keep individual judgement in the system, and measure what happens. Retain case-by-case review of stand-downs and suspensions, and require schools to record and publish restraint and exclusion data broken down by disability and ethnicity.
Do not shift the cost of unmet need onto families. Fines and liability will not improve a parent's attendance at a meeting or a child's day in class. They will deepen hardship for households that are already stretched.
A safe classroom and an inclusive classroom are the same classroom. Every child removed from a room is a child not learning. We should be asking how to keep them in it.
Berne Peters is National Manager – Kaitiaki Services at CCS Disability Action, leading the organisation's child safeguarding work alongside disabled people and whānau across Aotearoa New Zealand.
About CCS Disability Action
CCS Disability Action is the largest pan-disability support and advocacy organisation in Aotearoa New Zealand.
We support people with all types of impairments and have been working alongside disabled people since 1935.
We are at the forefront of service provision, advocacy and information sharing in the disability sector. We partner with disabled people, their families and whānau to enable them to have choice and control in their lives. Our vision is to see every disabled person and whānau hauā interwoven into the lives of their whānau and community.