Principal’s Pānui:
Tēnā koutou katoa,
The Budget has recently been announced for the next several years by our current government. The Budget overall holds a monstrous amount of information and yet there is one particular detail that has stuck with me in the weeks following the announcement. In what has been presented alongside a suite of “education investments” is a 2% increase to school operating budgets. The language surrounding this is varied but includes “to meet rising costs”, “help manage costs and maintain provisions” and “continue to provide services to meet the needs of students nationwide and raise achievement”.
This stands in stark contrast to the reality faced by New Zealand schools.
Like everyday Kiwis, schools have been facing the same price surges that homes have been facing over the past 5 years. While prices have surged for just about everything, our operating budgets have not. In a recent publication from the Post Primary Teachers Association, this lag has been calculated to show a reduction in real funding of 12% over 5 years – a reduction in purchasing power of hundreds of thousands of dollars. The call from the PPTA was made that anything less than a 5% increase in operational funding would fail to support our schools.
Unfortunately, the “education investment” designed to “provide services to meet the needs of students” is not real – we are projected to have inflation exceed our budget increases yet again in 2026; further reducing our funding in real terms. Simply put: funding for New Zealand schools is going backwards.
The reality is that schools have already cut any fat in the system and are reaching the point where now they must consider which essential services need to be cut. I have spoken to one principal who had to make a teacher aide/learning assistant redundant just to break even, and another who has cut their curriculum budgets by 20% for all faculties; in both cases taking precious learning resources out of their classrooms. Thankfully, Waiheke High School has sufficient reserves to protect these vital resources for now but we have been using our rainy day fund in recent years – a challenge that all schools are facing.
Currently, no political party has clearly stated that they will improve the funding of schools above the 5% space where it will begin to remedy this systemic shortfall. While politicians argue over which education policy they support, it seems there isn’t enough attention paid to whether or not schools can keep the lights on. As schools cannot improve their revenue streams through production like a typical business, we are at the whim of such policy decisions and can only remedy such shortfalls with fundraisers and donations – an increasingly common practice among all schools with the current fiscal pinch hurting everyone.
If you are interested in helping out with this ongoing challenge, I would encourage you to contact those across the political spectrum as we head into the election cycle to make as much noise around this as possible. This is an issue facing every primary, area and high school in New Zealand so the more voices raising concern around this shortfall the better. Alternatively, when you see fundraisers out and about in our local community, please support if you are able.
Having spoken at length about these issues with my fellow principals on Waiheke, our local schools are conscious that everyone is feeling the pinch at the moment so we don’t ask for help lightly. We do this because we want to protect our kids from bearing the brunt of this and because of the simple economic fact that the system is currently letting us down.
Ngā mihi mahana,
Cameron Flude
