Latest news with #learningSupport
RNZ News
26-05-2025
- Politics
- RNZ News
Learning support budget fails to deliver genuine reform: researcher
A teacher aide works with special needs students at Newmarket School in Auckland. Photo: RNZ / John Gerritsen Last week's budget contained a big boost for learning support - described as a "seismic shift" by the Minister of Education. The $747-million package will be spent on more specialist staff, teacher aide hours, support for the youngest children, and classrooms for specialist schools serving children with disabilities. However, specialist teaching roles in literacy and Maori are to be axed. The overall budget package has been welcomed by many in the sector, which has been crying out for more resourcing. The Aotearoa Educators' Collective - a grouping of education leaders and researchers - says there are positive steps, but genuine system reform is still missing. Kathryn speaks with Dr Sarah Aiono, a researcher from the AEC and CEO of Longworth Education.
RNZ News
22-05-2025
- Business
- RNZ News
Budget 2025: Government's $747m boost for learning a 'breakthrough'
The government's $747 million boost for learning support is getting the thumbs up from schools, despite the cuts it caused in other areas of education spending . The Principals' Federation described the increase as a "breakthrough", teacher union the Educational Institute Te Riu Roa said it was welcome but "a drop in the ocean", while the Post Primary Teachers' Association said increases to the funding pool for children with the most serious needs would make "a significant difference" for those students. Principals at a post-Budget briefing on Thursday afternoon told RNZ they agreed with Education Minister Erica Stanford's description of the increase as seismic, saying it would make a big difference for children with learning and behavioural needs. The money would provide more specialist staff, more teacher aide hours and included $100 million to build more classrooms for specialist schools serving children with disabilities. After the briefing, education consultant Margi Leech thanked Stanford for the increase in learning support funding. She later told RNZ the issue was very personal. "I have a daughter with Down syndrome and have had to fight to get support for her. It's as if the attitude in the past has been 'she's got Down syndrome she doesn't matter, she's never going to get a job'. But she's now 26, living in her own home, participating and contributing in the community... and I see that this Budget is recognising the potential for our very special children," she said. The initiative will ensure all primary and intermediate schools have access to a learning support coordinator, and boosts the service for pre-schoolers while also extending it into the first year of primary school. Oropi School principal Andrew King said the announcement would make a difference for the pupils at his school who had learning needs. "We've got about 30 or 40 children on our register... we have ORS children and high health needs children and children with lower needs," he said. "It's going to give the time needed to access the services that these kids need which we've just not had." Much of the funding was aimed at primary schools but Avonside Girls' High School principal Catherine Law said secondary schools would benefit from that. "When students come to us in Year 9 and 10, if they haven't had that kind of intervention and support in 0 to 8, then obviously we are having to pick up a lot more of the resourcing and working with those students and wrap around," she said. "So for us it actually is really, really great to hear that there'll be a lot of investment into that learning support coordinator role, into more teacher aide hours, and into those specialist roles in the primary sector and intermediate sector." Law said Avonside was part of a strong Kāhui Ako - the scheme that clustered schools to work together - but she accepted it would be cut to contribute $375 million to the learning support increase. Burnside High School principal Scott Haines said in 16 years as a principal he had never seen a Budget that would have so much impact on learning support. He said he was especially happy with a $122 million boost to the Ongoing Resource Scheme for students with the highest needs. "One of the big ticket items for me I think was every student who who gains ORS verification will get the funding. I think that's been a a source of great frustration for many years that we would get students denied for ORS funding based on the the lack of places rather than the lack of need," he said. However, Haines said he was disappointed the roll out of more learning support coordinators was focused on primary and intermediate schools, not secondary schools. He was also worried about funding for school property, despite a big boost in last year's Budget and $672m over four years in this year's Budget. "Capital investment in school property just remains at critical levels. Every school has a horror story around school property and it's the persistent issue across the country that will plague us in years to come," he said. Education Minister Erica Stanford had been promising a learning support Budget this year. She told RNZ she knew it would make a big difference. "This was huge to me personally and as you could see from some of the emotion in the audience, this is going to be huge for parents with children who need additional help at school - learners who have the most high and complex needs, right down to those children who just need a bit of extra help and literacy and numeracy. This is going to be game changing for those students," she said. Stanford said a significant portion of the new funding was focused on the youngest children. "We know the earlier we intervene in a child's life, the better chance of success they have, and so making sure we're getting ed-psychs, speech, language therapists, early intervention, teachers who deal with families and children and teachers involved as early as we possibly can means those children enter school and have the best chance to be able to learn to read and write, do mathematics and and have the chance of success," she said. Stanford said she was confident teachers and principals would accept the cuts made to other areas of the school budget in order to pay for the learning support increase. She said past education ministers and the Education Ministry itself had not ensured that spending was getting results. "We are going through every single line of spend, working out if it is getting the outcomes we need and if it's not we're going to stop it and reprioritise it elsewhere. And that's what you've seen this year. There is a significant reprioritisation directly into the frontline into our kids to change lives and away from things that weren't working. And frankly, that's what we should be doing from now on," she said.
RNZ News
22-05-2025
- Business
- RNZ News
Budget 2025: Māori education gets boost, targeted funding remains tight
Education Minister Erica Stanford said the wider investment in education is the most significant investment in learning support in a generation. Photo: 123RF Māori education has seen a boost with Budget 2025 , while other new targeted funding for Māori initiatives remains tight. Operational funding of $54 million and another $50 million in capital funding has been allocated to increase Māori learner success by investing in curriculum support and teacher development. The initiatives include: The disestablishment of the Wharekura Expert Teachers programme, disestablishing Resource Teachers and shifting unallocated funds from the Maori Language Funding to Support Provision and Growth initiative and reprioritising under-spent funding from Kaupapa Māori and Māori Medium Education will save the government around $72 million over four years. Education Minister Erica Stanford said the wider investment in education is the most significant investment in learning support in a generation. "Backed by a social investment lens, this is a seismic shift in how we support learning needs in New Zealand. We're deliberately prioritising early intervention, investing in what works and directly tackling long-standing inequities in the system." The Māori Women's Welfare League will get a funding boost and follows the announcement the Māori Wardens would also see an increase of around $1.5 million per year. Together, they will receive an increased operating budget of just over $13 million over four years. Māori housing initiatives administered by Te Puni Kokiri, including the Whai Kainga Whai Oranga, have been cut back and the money has been given to the government's new Flexible Housing fund, which looks to build more social housing and subsidise affordable rentals. Te Puni Kokiri will retain $17.5 million per annum housing funding while other Māori housing supports will be delivered by the Ministry of Housing and Urban Development. The government is also ending discretionary payments associated with Treaty Settlements, however this will not affect existing contractual commitments. It will save just under $3 million over four years. The Climate Resilience for Māori fund has been cut by 33 percent, down to an average of $2.6 million operating per annum remaining in this fund. The now scrapped Aotearoa Reorua (Bilingual Towns and Cities) Programme will see $1.6 million returned, however existing contracts will not be affected. Sign up for Ngā Pitopito Kōrero, a daily newsletter curated by our editors and delivered straight to your inbox every weekday.
RNZ News
22-05-2025
- Business
- RNZ News
Budget 2025: 'Underperforming' areas cut to pay for 'seismic shift' in education
Education Minister Erica Stanford. Photo: Samuel Rillstone / RNZ The 2025 Budget puts the handbrake on annual growth in education spending, as past splurges on school buildings run out in the next few years. Despite that, spending on teaching and learning continues to grow with what the government describes as a "seismic shift" in support for children with disabilities. Education Minister Erica Stanford said new education initiatives in the Budget totalled $2.5 billion over four years, though about $614m of that total was reprioritised from "underperforming" initiatives. The government's total spend on early childhood and school education would grow by roughly $400m to $19.85b in 2025-26, but drop to $19b and $18.9b in subsequent years. The future decline was partly due to the fact the $240m a year free school lunch programme, Ka Ora, Ka Ako, was only funded until the end of 2026, and to a $600m drop in capital funding by 2027-28 and beyond. The Budget revealed education's worst-kept secret - the axing of the major school-clustering scheme, Kahui Ako, to help bankroll a $720m increase for learning support. The increase included $266m to extend the early intervention service from early childhood through to the end of Year 1 of primary school, including employing 560 more early intervention teachers and specialists and helping an additional 4000 children. It also included $192m over three years to provide learning support coordinators in 1250 more primary schools, $122m to meet increased demand for the Ongoing Resourcing Scheme for students with the highest needs, and $90m to build 25 new satellite classrooms for specialist schools. Stanford said the government was building up to adding 2 million extra teacher aide hours by 2028. The other big education initiative in the Budget was $298m for curriculum, nearly half of it targeted to maths and literacy, and about $76m for a new standardised reading, writing and maths test for schools. Other areas of spending included $672m for property, $150m for the teaching workforce, $104m for Māori education, and $140m for attendance, which was announced prior to the Budget . School operations grants received a 1.5 percent boost at a cost of $79m per full year, or $121.7m over the four years. The Budget total included $3b a year for early childhood education, with a 0.5 percent increase to early childhood service subsidies. The Budget included an 11 percent increase to government subsidies for private schools, raising the annual spend by $4.6m to 46.2m a year. Associate Education Minister David Seymour said the annual spend on private schools had not changed since 2010, when they had about 27,600 pupils - and they now had more than 33,000. The annual spend on charter schools also doubles next year to $57m, most of it for those operating as secondary schools, with the increase largely due to the drawdown of funding for setting up the schools. The Budget showed the government expected to sign contracts for 30 to 50 charter schools in the next 12 months. [subhead] The cuts The Budget included a myriad of cuts to redirect funding to other education initiatives. "We have assessed underspends and reprioritised initiatives that are underperforming or lack clear evidence that they're delivering intended outcomes," Stanford said. The biggest cut was ending the Kahui Ako scheme, which paid about 4000 teachers extra to lead improvements in groups of schools, resulting in a reprioritisation of $375m over four years . The Budget repurposed spending of $72m over four years on programmes for kura kaupapa and Māori-medium education. However, half of it came from a contingency fund that was superseded by another source of money, meaning the sector was not suffering a cut from that part of the change. It also reprioritised $50m from schools' regional response fund, about $40m from resource teachers of literacy, and $14m from resource teachers of learning and behaviour in secondary schools. Also repurposed was about $37m from underspent funding on primary schools and $12m from the Positive Behaviour for Learning scheme for schools. A new $24m per year spend on support for the maths curriculum was bankrolled from a $28m a year spend on teacher professional development. Also cut was $2.6m a year for the Reading Together programme, $1.6m a year for study support centres and about $4m from the greater Christchurch renewal programme. A further $2m a year was saved by cutting a classroom set-up and vandalism grant for schools. The Budget said the net five-year impact of the funding cuts and increases was $1.69b. Last year's Budget reprioritised $429m over four years. Associate Education Minister David Seymour. Photo: RNZ / Samuel Rillstone [subhead] Tertiary funding rises The Budget boosted the government's subsidies for enrolments in tertiary courses next year by 3 percent - but only in some subject areas such as science, teacher education and health - at a total cost of $213m over four years. Enrolments in science, technology, engineering and maths (the STEM subjects) at degree-level and above would attract a further 1.5 percent, increase at a cost of $64m. The Budget also included $111m over four years to cover expected enrolment growth in 2025 and 2026. The government said it also proposed allowing tertiary institutes to raise the fees they charged domestic students by up to 6 percent next year "to further help providers manage cost pressures and maintain quality delivery". Vocational Education Minister Penny Simmonds said there would also be funding for two years starting next year to help polytechnics transition to independence from mega-institute Te Pukenga. The figure was not specified. There would also be $30m a year for the new Industry Skills Boards, which would replace Workforce Development Councils, plus one-off funding of $10m to help with establishment costs. Overall tertiary spending would total $3.8b next year. Sign up for Ngā Pitopito Kōrero, a daily newsletter curated by our editors and delivered straight to your inbox every weekday.
RNZ News
20-05-2025
- Politics
- RNZ News
Budget: Schools expecting more support for disabled students, ECEs and universities less optimistic
Berhampore School principal Mark Potter. Photo: RNZ / John Gerritsen Schools are expecting more support for disabled students in this week's government Budget. Education Minister Erica Stanford has told the sector to expect a "learning support Budget" and leaks show she has been planning to can a major education initiative to bankroll at least some of the spending. Learning support has been a consistent pressure point for schools. This week a report warned students could die because of a lack of resourcing and last month teacher union the Educational Institute Te Riu Roa urged the government to boost spending on learning support by nearly $800 million a year. Berhampore School principal and NZEI immediate past president Mark Potter was once rebuked for using property funding to assist pupils with disabilities. He told RNZ learning support funding was what schools needed the most from the Budget, but his hopes were not high. "We hear a lot of talk about there being something about learning support in here, but we've got decades of just talk. Just shifting a bit of resource from here to there is not what we need. What we really need is some serious, genuine long-term investment like the military just got, but we've been waiting longer," he said. Three separate leaks, two to RNZ and one to the Labour Party, indicated at least some of the money for learning support would come from axing the Kāhui Ako scheme, which paid 4000 teachers extra to guide training and collaboration in groups of schools. That would divert as much as $118m a year to help for disabled learners. Kāhui Ako had strong support from some principals but Waikato Principals Association president Lesley Lomas said there was only so much money to go around and learning support was a big issue. "It's a priority for all of us. We have consistently been asking for support in this area so we realise there's not a new bit of pie, we probably have to make some adjustments from one area of the education sector to another," she said. The government had already announced extra funding in other problem areas for schools. Truancy would receive an extra $140m over four years, nearly half of it taken from other education schemes, and maths teaching would receive $100m, also over four years. In the early learning sector, Early Childhood Council chief executive Simon Laube said centres were closing because of the gap between government subsidies and the cost of running an early childhood service. "Areas where their families are struggling are not doing very well. It's very hard to run a viable centre in any community where the families can't contribute anything to make up the shortfall in funding to make some of these policies work," he said. Laube said the council's members were nervous about the Budget and were hoping for an increase in government subsidies and no surprises. At the other end of the education system, universities feared a temporary four percent funding increase designed to help them through a tough couple of years would be allowed to lapse. Chris Whelan from Universities New Zealand last year said that would be catastrophic . This week he told RNZ it would hurt, but universities were prepared. "We've been given high-level messages not to expect much or all of it to continue. Probably the best thing is having those early messages meant that universities have been able to take decisions with that in mind. It's going to be tough if it's not maintained but universities have now built it into some of their assumptions. We've essentially had six to eight months to prepare for it," he said. Meanwhile, the government wanted to stand up a new industry training system and some individual polytechnics from the remains of mega-institute Te Pukenga next year. Whether there was enough in Te Pukenga's kitty to bankroll that or if it would require additional funding was a question the Budget should answer. Sign up for Ngā Pitopito Kōrero , a daily newsletter curated by our editors and delivered straight to your inbox every weekday.
