Learning Support In Schools At Breaking Point, Report Finds

Scoop

19-05-2025

Learning support in schools is at breaking point, with some schools fearing a child is going to die in their care because they cannot provide the appropriate supervision, according to a new report.
The report by the Aotearoa Educators' Collective highlighted broken funding systems, families battling bureaucracy and children who have extra needs denied access.
Learning support is for neurodivergent children, or those with disabilities, health needs or experiences of trauma.
Report author Dr Sarah Aiono said the most frequent and hard hitting answer to the survey on the state of learning support was just one word: "Dire".
"[Teachers] shared that it was just stretched beyond capacity, that they were doing the work to secure funding, that they were trying to navigate the needs, they were trying to advocate all over and above their basic core job which is to be in school and to teach our children," she said.
Aiono said schools were concerned about their ability to keep children safe.
"I had one principal who said to me that they have a student in their school who faints between 16 and 22 times a day and she did not qualify for high health needs support, so because there was no funding available to manage that her teachers and her peers in her high school were left to manage every time she fainted," she said.
"Teachers and principals are scared they're going to lose a child to death, that a child is going to die under their care because they cannot provide the supervision to support that child to be safe at school."
An estimated 15-20 percent of the population is neurodivergent, but only 6-7 percent of students receive any publicly funded learning support.
"We're now getting to the point where there are actually more children in classrooms than we've ever had before with multiple needs, so it's a sort of perfect storm coming together now that the needs are growing exponentially but the funding is not keeping up and our expertise or availability to specialist support is not available either," Aiono said.
"One of the parents that I spoke to, she's been waiting for about six to 12 weeks since her 14-year-old has been out of school to even know where to get the help and in that time she's worrying that that child is now not getting support to face NCEA the following year."
The report found Māori and Pasifika students, those attending rural schools and neurodivergent students were most affected by chronic underfunding, fragmented provision and inconsistent access.
The report, titled Beyond Capacity: Learning Support in Crisis, is being launched at Parliament on Tuesday, and Education Minister Erica Stanford has been invited.