Some Crazy Education Funding Statistics for New Zealand.
AKA: Our actual spending to try and improve things is tiny!
AKA: The current government is a very long way from keeping their promises to reduce the spend on bureaucracy.
1. Our government education spend for 2024-25 is $20.5billion (exclusive of tertiary education).
2. 31.3% of the public sector work-force is for education (150,800 employees).
3. This is all paid for by taxpayers. Any government likes to say “they are spending” … it is never true. They are only allocating other people’s money.
4. The Ministry of Education budget – after excluding property (where they are known to be incompetent) and frontline services for learning support – is $547million.
5. The National and ACT parties promised to reduce the Ministry employment of “full time equivalents” to 2,700 (the number before the recent Labour government). Halfway through their term the Ministry FTE is at 3,949 with a “head-count” of 4,217 employees (which does not include teachers). i.e. A massively broken promise that I hope the Taxpayers Union is investigating. We have a hugely bloated Education Ministry and on their way to this staff blow-out all achievement statistics for NZ students have declined.
It should also be noted that the oversight of the MOE by the Minister and State Services has not been able to appoint a new Secretary for Education despite the old one walking out the door in October 2024. The current senior leadership of the MOE is to Education in NZ as Mike Tyson is to Ballet worldwide. They MUST employ someone from well outside the current system!
6. The percentage of spend for food for supporting education for early childhood and schools is: $273,548,000 / 20,500,000,000 = 1.33%. i.e. recognize the current social/educational situation and feed the children well. Afterall – parents are paying via tax. Doing crazy things to save $120 million here is like not building the best sand castle on a NZ beach as you are worried about running short of grains. Seymour saving $120 million – while creating all sorts of havoc and providing only 15% of daily nutrition to the kids who are:
– actually at school.
– eligible to school lunches
… is like the savings you get from playing the neutral game in the car for the last 400m to home after you have driven from Wellington to Auckland.
7. Funding to improve attendance is: $34,000,000 / 20,500,000,000 -= 0.17% of the education spend. Attendance and the 10,000 children enrolled nowhere are the biggest problems for our system and we have a barely attentive Ass Minister and are spending copper on improving it.
8. The failing Charter School roll-out is only $123,000,000 – $30,000,000 on the Charter School Agency – both over four years = 0.12% of the education spend. Not a chance of being “game-changing”.
9. In term 4 of 2024 the overall attendance by school students in NZ was 58.1%. This is marginally up on T4 2023 but it was 64.7 in 2021.
For Maori the full attendance figure was 44.1%.
For Pasifika the full attendance figure was 42.4%.
NB: David Seymour is the Associate Minister in charge of school lunches, attendance and Charter Schools. He has negotiated with National to enable himself to allocate funds like Scrouge McSeymour.
10. The MOE direct funding for Early Learning, Primary Schooling, Secondary Schooling totaled $8.382billion.
Direct funding for supporting parents in education totaled: 2.97 million. i.e. 0.04% of the education budget. Those figures speak to the fact that we often blame parents but barely lift a finger to actually assist them.
The National/ACT education mandate was for change. At best change is currently glacial. The curriculum changes have some positive aspects but are at the margins for many and the NCEA changes that have now been embedded are crushing Maori, Pasifika and low income students.
In terms of education National/ACT is governing for their voters and not the general population and those that need improvement the most.
Alwyn Poole
alwyn.poole@gmail.com
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