We’re undertaking a review of education funding for early childhood services and schooling. The Review is part of the Government’s Education Work Programme or building a sustainable, fit for purpose education system that enables all young New Zealanders to achieve educational success.
We’ll be regularly updating this information, including ways you can be involved in the Review, so keep checking back.
It’s important to remember that we are still in the very early stages of the Review and no decisions have been made. It’s a very big piece of work that will require a lot of ongoing discussion and work.
The focus of the Review
In 2015, we undertook exploratory work to understand the strengths and weaknesses of the education funding systems and to identify opportunities for improvement.
Since then we’ve been focused on exploring high-level ideas to help shift the funding systems to:
- better direct funding to the size of the education challenge that ECE services, schools and Communities of Learning face, rather than the size of their rolls and the cost of their inputs
- shift the focus to growing the learning and achievement of all children and young people, particularly those most at risk.
In practical terms, we want a funding system that is focused on learning outcomes and educational success for every young New Zealander by:
- targeting the right resource to the right child at the right time
- incentivising and prioritising governance and leadership attention to these.
Working with the education sector
The ideas we have for possible directions for changes are just a starting point for discussion. We’re working with the education sector to test our ideas and identify the best changes to the funding system for achieving our objectives. This engagement is happening from May to August 2016.
We’ve established an Advisory Group who and will work with us to test these proposals from a whole of system perspective. Go to the Advisory Group page for more information.
Alongside the Advisory Group, we’re also talking to the wider education sector about the possible directions for changes.
Proposed directions for change
There are 2 key components that lie at the heart of the proposed directions for change we will be talking to the sector about. These are:
- a standard per child funding amount tailored to the learning expectations of children and young people at each stage of their education journey, rather than based on their age and year level
- additional resources for children and young people most at risk of educational under- chievement to replace the current decile-based system for both early childhood education services and schooling.
We’ll be publishing more information about the proposals later in June.
After engagement ends in August
We’ll use the information gathered from all the different strands of engagement to develop advice to the Minister later this year on possible next steps.
If there is a decision to progress changes, we will work alongside the education sector on the details in the coming years. This will allow us to implement any changes in time for the next decile recalibration, expected in 2020.
More information
Download National Cross-Sector Forum presentations:
- Review of Funding Systems: First stage update (20 November 2015)
- Review of Funding Systems: The next stage of the Review (26 May 2016).
Read the Stock take of funding system for school-age education in New Zealand. The equivalent ECE report will be available later in June.
Email funding.review@education.govt.nz for more information, or if you have any questions about the Review of Funding Systems for ECE services and schooling.