Hutt Intermediate School is getting a new teaching block with 14 classrooms.
By Justin Wong for Local Democracy Reporting
The school at Waterloo joins five others in Northland, Auckland, Canterbury and Southland to receive $56.6 million for 52 new classrooms in a government announcement on Monday, which it said would fix longstanding problems and bring school facilities up to standard.
The new block at Hutt Intermediate would include six specialist and eight general learning areas.
Infrastructure Minister and Hutt South MP Chris Bishop said the work was set to begin in the next six months. A spokesperson from his office declined to comment on the amount the school received, citing commercial sensitivity.
The funding was part of the $2 billion allocated to modernise school infrastructure.
Bishop said the average cost of a classroom had significantly dropped because more of them were built in a factory with repeated designs. In 2025, the government completed 583 new classrooms, which was 31% more than in 2023.
“That means more classrooms, delivered faster, providing better learning environments for our kids and better value for taxpayers,” he said.
Education Minister Erica Stanford said the Government had inherited a school property system nearing crisis.
“Schools were promised new projects but were left waiting, often for years, on unfunded, bespoke, expensive plans.”
She said that the Government had prioritised school infrastructure to get school communities “the classrooms, upgrades and maintenance work they have long waited for”.
Hutt Intermediate declined to comment, instead referring questions to the Ministry of Education.
- LDR is local body journalism co-funded by RNZ and NZ On Air
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