Education Minister Erica Stanford has informed the education sector to anticipate a “learning support budget”, while leaked information reveals she has been considering scrapping an education initiative to fund at least part of the new spending.
According to a new report by the Aotearoa Educators’ Collective, learning support for neurodivergent children, as well as those with disabilities or health needs in schools, is reaching a critical breaking point. Some schools are so overwhelmed that they fear a child could die under their care due to the inability to provide adequate supervision.
Last month, the teacher union Educational Institute Te Riu Roa called on the government to increase funding for learning support by nearly $800 million annually.
Some leaks suggested that at least part of the funding for learning support would be sourced by cutting the Kāhui Ako scheme, which provided additional pay to 4,000 teachers for leading training and collaboration across groups of schools.
This move could redirect up to $118 million annually to support disabled learners.
In the early learning sector, Simon Laube, chief executive of the Early Childhood Council, stated that centres are shutting down due to the disparity between government subsidies and the actual costs of operating an early childhood service.
“Areas where their families are struggling are not doing very well. It’s very hard to run a viable centre in any community where the families can’t contribute anything to make up the shortfall in funding to make some of these policies work,” Laube said.
Laube mentioned that the council’s members were anxious about the budget, hoping for a rise in government subsidies and no unexpected changes.
The government had previously announced additional funding for other challenging areas in schools. Truancy is set to receive an extra $140 million over four years, with nearly half of that amount reallocated from other education programmes, while math instruction will be allocated $100 million over the same period.