Students at a Western Bay of Plenty school were speechless when they arrived to find trailer loads of rubbish and a used car dumped on their school grounds.

Last Thursday Pahoia School teachers and Principal Marcus Norrish dumped about four trailer loads of recyclable rubbish in the courtyard of the school in a 'risky” plan to get children thinking.

About four trailer loads of rubbish was dumped on Pahoia School grounds.

'We just wanted to do something to sort of make you stop and go ‘what's going on?' and then see what kind of direction they went with their wonderings and their thinking after that.”

The rubbish sourced from teachers' homes and the Maleme Street Transfer Station was scattered around the school grounds at about 7am.

Marcus says children were shocked when they arrived to find their school trashed.

'They really just wandered around going ‘wow' and started talking about what they thought might have happened.

'Some kids thought about who did it? Other kids started thinking about what would happen if we didn't clean it up?”

A full school assembly was held after children arrived to discuss the rubbish before children headed back to their classrooms.

They weren't told it was a set-up until just before heading home for the day.

Marcus says the parents though it was a good idea.

'They loved the fact that it was just something different and a little bit risky.”

This is the first time the school has done something like this as a whole school and Marcus says he wants to make it an on-going initiative each term.

Classes have carried on using the experience as a launch pad into an enquiry unit based on what they thought and learnt after the experience.