Sue Barrowman said the idea for a holistic school was in the very early stages of planning and research.
A qualified speech, language and behavioural therapist, Ms Barrowman is working with a Queenstown family who have converted a shed on their property into a school for their 7-year-old son, who has been diagnosed with autism.
Part of Ms Barrowman's involvement is to develop a curriculum for him, which will be tested as a pilot curriculum for the proposed school.
Ms Barrowman said the family's converted pony shed now comprised a formal learning room and a physical room for the child to be home-schooled. The parents have put an "enormous" amount of time and financial investment into their child's education, she said.
"It's a wonderful opportunity to really test the theories behind the curriculum. We are using this year to get the format right," she said.
The boy's mother, who declined to be named, said her son did not fit into mainstream school and there was no alternative in the Wakatipu.
"There was no flexibility to accommodate us and we had no options left. So, for us, what Sue is doing is amazing. He has really excelled. We've seen huge changes," she said.
Ms Barrowman hoped to put a proposal together for a school in Queenstown by the end of the year. She said there was no alternative for children with special needs in the resort, and if parents pulled their children from mainstream it appeared they no longer had access to any government services.
The proposed school would suit any child who did not fit into mainstream schooling, as the approach was highly personalised, she said.
For this child, home schooling had given him an opportunity to work at his own pace and explore more natural and emotional interactions with family and therapists.
This has successfully increased spontaneous language capabilities.
Ms Barrowman works with other children in the Wakatipu Basin who are part of the Central and Southern Autism Trust.
The idea came for the new school after she became frustrated with feeling she was constantly fighting the education system. Traditional methods of teaching were failing some children, she said.
She wanted to teach in a more holistic way, addressing causes and pre-requisite skills as opposed to tackling symptoms head on; and found the traditional approach to children with behavioural issues did not always work.
"Any individual can be taught to comply. That's not the same as learning,"she said.
Before training as a speech therapist, Ms Barrowman trained in a CABAS school in Ireland for children with autism spectrum disorders.
The Comprehensive Application of Behaviour Analysis to Schooling (CABAS) is a learner and research-driven, system-wide approach, providing individualised programmes for children and young people with and without disabilities.
The school took 12 children every year and provided opportunities for teachers to gain qualifications and conduct research, as well as teaching the children.
Ms Barrowman called applied behaviour analysis a "stunning science". She said it was often misunderstood or used as a table-top therapy.
"It was amazing to see what could be achieved quite quickly," she said.
Ms Barrowman has now combined her behavioural experience with an emotional and developmental approach, and, along with the help of her husband, has come to appreciate a much wider view to child development. Her husband, Robert Brydges, is a chiropractor also trained in applied kinesiology.
Ms Barrowman said understanding how the body worked at a physical and an emotional level was very important to teaching children. How the left and right sides of the brain "talked to each other", and what belief systems children adopted, affected how children perceived the world and responded to it, she said.
Instead of telling a child what to do, it was more helpful to understand and support certain behaviour and let it run its natural course, she said.
"The more you fight something, the more it resists.
"Some children just don't learn in a particular way, and with teacher ratios so high it's too hard for teachers to personalise learning to the extent that's needed.
"I'm all for inclusive education, but not at the expense of a child learning to their potential," she said.
Children were given teacher aides but the aides were so underpaid that incentives to learn and develop more skills were not there, she said.
One-on-one attention should be a short-term solution, with efforts made to slowly incorporate a child into larger groups of learning.
Most children who have any delay in development require more physical input, as gross and fine motor skills are important pre-requisite skills to numeracy and literacy. For children on the autistic spectrum, a large amount of emotional development is needed.
Therefore it is intended children will have access to a variety of professional services so they are physically and emotionally balanced before being expected to engage at a more cognitive or academic level.
Ms Barrowman aimed for the new school to have one teacher for every six or 12 children, whereas mainstream schools had ratios of up to 1:29. Initially, however, some children would require one-on-one, or a similar smaller ratio, to get them started, she said.
The couple were exploring some creative options as a way to keep costs down, but the school would require a level of public or private funding.
