had intended to establish her own school for deaf-mutes. The Secretary of Education, John Hislop, visited Miss Mitchell in Lyttelton in March 1879 to see her proposed school, which he thought unsuitable. It soon became apparent that the school would be also be associated with an orphanage, which Rolleston felt was not what Parliament intended. Nevertheless, in June 1879, the Government assisted Miss Mitchell investigate other possibilities in Dunedin and Oamaru. Appointment of the first director In June 1879, Vogel informed Grey that Gerrit van Asch had been selected as the Institution's first Director. Van Asch, who was born in 1836 and had been specially trained in Holland and Germany in the Pure Oral method, before moving to England in 1859 to establish private schools for educating deaf mutes by spoken language and lip-reading only. The commissioners reported he was the only applicant, of seventeen, who was trained in the German system system, teaching lip-reading, speech, writing and reading concurrently. They also noted he also spoke English "without an accent". Of the other applicants, the Commissioners reported that 12 men were trained to teach with sign, and 3 men had no special training. (No mention was made of the abilities or gender of the remaining applicant.) He emigrated to New Zealand in October 1879 and selected the Sumner site temporarily, with intentions to move to a larger population center in the future. Commencement The Institution for the Deaf and Dumb opened for "training and instruction of deaf-mutes" in Sumner on 10 March 1880. By June 1880, the school had 10 students and grew to have 37 students, including one from Australia, as well as 4 teachers, by the end of 1885. From January 1886, the Institution for Deaf-Mutes, as it was by then known as, leased "Sumner College", a large five-year-old building that had been erected as a boarding school by Mr. C. L. Wiggins, in order to accommodate its growing roll. From the beginning Van Asch was enthusiastic to demonstrate his teaching methods to the many visitors to the school and they were amazed by the results. In his response to the 1886 report, the Minister of Education observed that the "deaf are seldom dumb". In 1888, an assistant teacher from the Sumner Institution, who was visiting schools for the deaf in other countries to see their teaching methods, was giving evidence before a Royal Commission into the Education