There are real budget choices re Education.

Dear Supporters and Interested Parties

1. There is ample evidence to show that our education system is still in freefall:

- barely marginal increases in attendance.

- a huge decline in the number of Pacifica and Maori students achieving level 1 NCEA.

2. A HUGE cost factor for education is the Ministry of Education budget. Both National and ACT promised to decrease the MoE employment to the pre-Ardern government number of 2,700.

It is still above 4,200 and costs many millions with a negative correlation with student achievement. The Ministry of Education has huge negative effect on the achievement of NZ children and young people. Collectively - they are appalling.

The Minister (Stanford) and Ass Minister (Seymour) are completely out of line and have no political will to change anything significant.

It matters very little if you change literacy and numeracy programmes if barely 50% of students are fully attending school (the low bar of 90% of days).

3. One of the great BUDGET savings would be to slash the staff costs of the MoE - with the likely consequence of a significant improvement in our education system performance.

Unless the current government can make this kind of decision - their hand wringing on austerity has no credibility.

- Our government education spend for 2024-25 is $20.5billion (exclusive of tertiary education).

- 31.3% of the public sector work-force is for education (150,800 employees).

- 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.

- 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! Re-appointing Ellen MR for another 12 months as the acting secretary shows just how timid Erica Stanford is.

- 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

- 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.

- 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”.

- 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%.