Columba College says it has championed single-cell classrooms for decades to minimise distraction and a recent government announcement to "call time" on open-plan classrooms validated their decision.
Open-plan spaces were introduced to foster collaboration and flexibility, but Minister for Education Erica Stanford said the experiment had failed and they created challenges for managing noise and student behaviour.
In many cases, they reduced flexibility.
Columba College assistant principal Marion Hogg, who has been teaching for nearly 50 years, said single-cell classrooms were the ideal environment for teaching.
It enabled routines, helped establish a culture and made students feel more secure.
"You can look after their emotional and academic needs along with their behaviour needs.
"I think it gives teachers a real strength of getting to know their children and just knowing what they need and when they need it."
In open-plan classrooms students did not receive enough one-on-one attention from teachers, she said.
"If you’ve got 60 to 80 children, its very hard for one or two teachers to monitor every child in those spaces."
In particular, younger children needed a connection with teachers.
"I just think it makes for happy children when we know that if anything is going wrong, we can easily identify it straight away."
Otago Girls’ High School principal Bridget Davidson said schools were about the people in them, not the buildings.
"Open-plan or not — the quality of the teaching and learning remains if the school culture and relationships are rich and strong, and the thirst for learning and knowledge is there."
Her school was opened in 1871 when open-plan classrooms were not a thing.
The school had integrated inter-class collaboration by using other creative ways, for example teaching about 150 year 10 social studies students together in an extended 80 minute period in the hall.
