The gap between ambition and execution
David Seymour told the country the interest was huge and that people knew what New Zealand was doing in education “just isn’t working.” He was right about the interest. Seventy-eight groups applied to run charter schools. But converting existing state schools, the harder and more consequential reform, has produced a pipeline of aspiration and a record of zero completions.
The Charter School Agency confirmed that 18 groups have lodged expressions of interest in converting state or state-integrated schools to charter status, up from 12 in September 2024. Three are in active contract negotiations. Yet as of mid-2025, all 11 approved charter schools are new schools, not conversions. Against a budget target of 35 state school conversions for 2025-2026, the programme is significantly behind schedule.
Collective agreements are the real bottleneck
Charter School Agency chief executive Sean Teddy acknowledged that converting state schools was a new process and the agency was taking time to get it right. That diplomatic framing obscures three genuinely difficult structural problems.
First, employment agreements. Charter schools can set their own pay, hire non-registered teachers and structure employment outside collective agreements. But for conversions, existing staff hold collectively bargained rights built up over decades. The agency must translate those into bespoke arrangements while ensuring staff are no worse off. For business owners familiar with enterprise bargaining, imagine trying to exit a multi-employer collective agreement while keeping every affected worker on equivalent terms. It is not quick.
Second, property. Charter sponsors typically own their school buildings. State school land and buildings belong to the Crown. Transferring operational control while protecting the Crown’s property interest requires negotiation that has no template.
Third, funding calibration. The agency is working to ensure converted charters are not better funded than comparable state schools, which means the per-pupil model needs careful design rather than a simple transplant.
New schools are working, which makes the conversion stall more frustrating
The first cohort of new charter schools, seven that opened at the start of 2025 plus Twin Oaks Classical School in July, enrolled 658 pupils between them, with some surpassing targets. Villa Education Trust’s South Auckland Middle School, which operated as a charter school under the original National government before Labour pushed it to designated character status, has a waitlist of 80-90 students for 45 annual places.
The demand signal is real. But Villa’s chief executive Karen van Gemerden offered an instructive caution. She noted that switching to designated character school status under Labour “did give us more availability to some of the ministry resources for some support of the students etc that we weren’t entitled to as a charter school.” Charter autonomy comes with trade-offs, not just freedoms.
An AI company and iwi organisations are both in the queue
The applicant pool reveals how far charter schooling has moved from its original ideological framing. Being AI’s Ascend School has Brett O’Riley as executive chair, describing the application as “a highly competitive process.” A technology company running a publicly funded school is the sharpest edge of private-sector participation in education.
At the other end, Ngati Toa’s Puna Matauranga is developing Kura Toa, an iwi-led secondary school in Porirua announced to open in Term 3 2026. Seymour cited the data justifying it: 28.5 percent of Maori students in Porirua left school without NCEA Level 1, compared to 17.8 percent across all Wellington students.
The government has tried to reduce friction. Contract terms have been doubled from 10 to 20 years with renewal rights, and legislation now provides a reversion pathway so converted schools can return to state status if the arrangement fails.
Structural change alone does not fix struggling schools
KPMG’s analysis provides the necessary cold water. The firm noted that “large-scale structural change in and of itself rarely delivers the promised gains in academic performance.” International evidence, particularly from the United States, shows high variance among charter schools, with some exceptional performers and many that underperform comparable state schools.
The schools most likely to benefit from charter conversion are those serving specific communities with specific needs: iwi-led education, faith-based schooling, alternative pedagogies. Generic struggling state schools looking for a structural fix to underlying social and resource problems are less likely to find one in a change of governance model.
At roughly $10,000 per pupil in government funding, charter schools are creating a genuine market for private-sector participation in public education. Whether that market produces better outcomes for students or primarily delivers employment flexibility for sponsors is the question the next two years of data will need to settle. The government has built the architecture. Now it needs to prove conversions can actually happen.
Sources
- RNZ: State schools increasingly consider becoming charter schools (2025-06-18)
- RNZ: 78 applications to set up charter schools, David Seymour says (2024-07-23)
- RNZ: The deal with charter schools (2024-11-18)
- RNZ: Two state schools poised to become charter schools (2025-03-06)
- RNZ: David Seymour announces new iwi-led charter school for Wellington region (2025-05-28)
- Ministry of Education: RIS Pathway for charter schools to revert back to state sector (2025)
- Newsroom: AI company one step closer to charter school status (2024-10-07)
- KPMG: Implementing charter schools in New Zealand (2024-07)