In New Zealand, and internationally, the types of school building structures in some cases are being changed to large flexible teaching spaces which accommodate 50 to 160 plus students and have multiple teachers. Some New Zealand schools are newly built, where teachers may have input into the design, whilst others are adapting existing traditional single teacher classrooms into larger flexible learning spaces. This article explores the perceptions of eight teachers from six New Zealand schools where there were traditional single teacher classrooms and six teachers who were teaching in a newly built innovative learning environment New Zealand school with large flexible learning spaces. It seeks to uncover the different supports and barriers that these teachers found when teaching, particularly in the two core curriculum areas of reading and mathematics.