[7] In November 1878, Sir George Grey, Colonial Secretary, wrote to Julius Vogel, then the Agent-General for New Zealand, in London, to recruit a suitable teacher from England.

[8] Upon seeing news of this correspondence in the Lyttelton Times, Dorcas Mitchell wrote to Grey seeking appointment and indicating she 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.

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.

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.

[14] 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.

[14] 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 of Deaf-Mutes, in London.

[15] The School Attendance Act 1901, which was enacted on 7 November 1901, required children who were deaf or blind be given "efficient and suitable" education between the ages of seven and sixteen.

Children were taught exclusively via oral methods, forcing them to learn to lipread and speak, with punishments being given for use of sign language.

[23] Nevertheless, school student also acquired sign language from some of the adult support staff, who were also deaf, as well as older pupils and their peers in various social settings away from the classroom and not supervised by their teachers.

[25] In the late 1970s, the school switched to bilingual teaching and currently, in addition to presenting the curriculum in NZSL, Sign Supported English and oral (aural) modes, the college now offers the facility for deaf and hard of hearing students being educated in mainstream settings to learn about NZSL as part of a Deaf Studies curriculum.

Notable people associated with the college include rugby player Patrick Harvey, who taught at the school, and Deaf community advocate Hilary McCormack, who was a boarder for a year, and later was chair of the Board of Trustees.