Employers will inherit the literacy target officials expect to miss

The Ministry of Education has told the government, in effect, that it can fill classrooms faster than it can teach the children sitting in them. Its 2026 annual report rates the target of 80% of students attending regularly by 2030 as ‘probable’, but the target of 80% of Year 8s at expected curriculum level as ‘at risk’.

That split matters more to employers than any other line in the report. A 2030 attendance win will be sold as proof the education reforms worked. It will say almost nothing about whether the young people arriving in workplaces can read a contract, check an invoice or write a coherent email.

Attendance responds to paperwork

Attendance is a lever governments can actually pull. On the government’s own Term 1 comparisons, regular attendance rose from 59.0% in 2023 to 68.8% in 2026, and every school has had to run an Attendance Management Plan since the start of this year. The annual report’s Term 2 snapshot is lower at 64.3%, with illness accounting for half of all absences, but the direction is clear.

The speed tells the story. By Term 1 2025, 96% of schools had an attendance policy, 94% were using an approved register and 93% had adopted new attendance codes. Compliance rolled out across almost the entire system inside a year. Credit where it is due, that is a genuine administrative achievement, and getting kids through the gate is a precondition for everything else.

Year 8 results have barely moved

What happens once they are through the gate is a different matter. The Year 8 baseline at the end of 2023 was 47% in reading, 24% in writing and 22% in maths. The latest results sit at 45%, 28% and 24%. The ministry’s own assessment is that achievement ‘has largely stabilised with early upwards shifts in maths and writing’, while significant gaps persist for Māori, Pacific and lower socio-economic students.

Stabilised is not the same as improving. Reading is slightly below where it started. To hit 80% by December 2030, maths would need to more than triple in four years.

There is a fair defence here. Structured literacy and the hour-a-day policy for reading, writing and maths were introduced from 2024, and instructional reform takes a school generation to show up in results. The ministry makes that very point, noting most of the new tools have only been in place since early 2025. But that defence cuts both ways. If the fix takes a generation, the students who have already missed it are in the labour market now.

The bill started arriving in 2025

The NCEA literacy and numeracy co-requisite is where the gap turns into lost qualifications. In February 2026, RNZ reported that 15,000 students, roughly 5,000 Year 13s and 10,000 Year 12s, finished 2025 with no NCEA certificate because they had not met the co-requisite. At the poorest-served schools only 74% of Year 12s cleared it, down from 85% in 2021. Principals warned the problem would worsen when the alternative pathway closes in 2028, with some literate and numerate students failing the test and leaving with nothing.

Those students are entering the workforce between now and 2028. The current Year 8 cohort, at 24% to 45% proficiency, arrives around 2030 to 2032, exactly when ministers expect to be celebrating the attendance target.

Employers have been warning about this for years

None of this will surprise anyone who hires school leavers. Back in 2023, Canterbury Employers’ Chamber of Commerce chief executive Leeann Watson said businesses were spending time and money teaching young staff basic literacy, numeracy and communication skills once taken for granted, with one employer having to teach a young worker how to write a work email. That same year, then-BusinessNZ chief executive Kirk Hope flagged ‘red flags in both the compulsory and tertiary education system’.

The cost does not stay inside individual firms. MBIE’s 2025 Going for Growth report tied weak school outcomes to labour market risk, noting benefit dependency had climbed to 12.6% of the working-age population in December 2024, up from 9.3% in 2017. Every young person who leaves school without the basics is either a training cost for an employer or a fiscal cost for the taxpayer.

Judge the reforms on the right number

The government deserves credit for setting measurable targets and for an annual report honest enough to say one of them is in trouble. The risk is that the easier target becomes the headline and the harder one fades quietly.

For business, the scorecard that matters is not who turned up in Term 2. It is the Year 8 maths figure, the co-requisite pass rate and the share of leavers with a qualification. Until those move, employers should assume the foundational skills gap is a cost they will keep carrying, and plan their induction, training budgets and recruitment accordingly. Business groups should be pressing ministers to report achievement as loudly as attendance, because 2030 is closer than the next cohort of hires.

Sources

• RNZ: Government’s attendance goal doable, literacy and numeracy unlikely (2026-10-28)
• DPMC: Government Target Quarterly Report Summary, quarter ending 31 March 2026 (2026-06)
• DPMC: Factsheet Target 7, more students at expected curriculum levels (2024-12)
• Ministry of Education: Improving achievement (2026-07-21)
• RNZ: NCEA hurdle trips up 15,000 students (2026-02-02)
• NZ Herald: Making the Grade, young workers lack literacy, numeracy and communications skills, employers say (2023-06-20)
• The Post: Skills and education, mind the gap (2023-07-10)