New Ministry figures show the number of people in teacher training is up 40% since 2023. Education Minister Erica Stanford credits the School Onsite Training Programme, which pays people to learn the job inside a school. Rangiora High School principal Bruce Kearney offers the less flattering read: “when unemployment rises, there’s normally a spike in people going into teaching.” With a qualification that takes 32 weeks and schools crying out for staff, he calls it “a no-brainer”.
The honest answer is that a sensible policy and a weaker labour market have landed at the same time, and nobody can yet separate the two. That matters, because the next government will be tempted to claim the credit and then stop paying for the bit that actually worked.
The cycle the Ministry already admits
Kearney’s theory is not anecdote. The Ministry’s own statistics site explicitly links the 2022-2023 slump in enrolments to the border reopening and low unemployment. When good jobs were plentiful, people stopped choosing a year of study on no income to earn a teacher’s salary. Now the market has softened and the flow has reversed.
The reversal is sharp. Domestic first-time enrolments rose from 3600 in 2024 to 4290 in 2025, with primary up 33% and secondary up 26%. By February, the Ministry was reporting supply at its strongest since records began in 2004, with a projected primary surplus of 530 this year growing to 1350 by 2028.
That is a remarkable turnaround. In 2025, the Ministry’s demand report had projected a need for 750 more primary and 500 more secondary teachers, with acute shortages in Northland, Bay of Plenty and Auckland. A shortage became a surplus inside a year. Workforces do not swing that fast on policy alone.
Paying people to train is the right idea
That said, the onsite model deserves credit on its own merits. Trainees spend three days a week in a host school while completing a one-year qualification and receive a $20,660 tax-free bursary, with the host school getting $2000 for mentoring. It removes the biggest barrier for career-changers, the cost of a year without pay, and puts them in front of students from week one.
Any employer running an apprenticeship would recognise the logic. Places have grown from 147 in 2024 to 528 this year, heading to 704 a year from 2028. The extra $21.7 million over five years also came from redirecting a relocation grant for foreign early childhood teachers rather than new baseline spending. Fiscally, that is how it should be done.
But scale matters. Even at 704 places, onsite training is a fraction of an intake running above 4000. The programme cannot plausibly explain a 40% surge by itself. The job market is carrying a large share of the load.
Enrolments are not teachers
The more important number is the one nobody is headlining. First-time graduates rose just 2.4% between 2024 and 2025, from 3115 to 3190. The surge is in the pipeline, not yet in classrooms. If the economy recovers before these cohorts finish, some will walk, just as they did in 2022.
Quality is the other open question. In 2024, the Education Review Office found only one in five principals considered new graduates ready for the classroom, and 49% of new teachers felt unprepared. The PPTA has warned that faster, work-based pathways are arriving alongside a once-in-a-generation curriculum and assessment change that demands deep pedagogical grounding. Speed is not the same as readiness.
Who gets the training dollars
There is also a procurement wrinkle any business owner would ask about. More than half of this year’s 533 places went to non-university providers, and 152 went to a single provider, the Teachers’ Institute, a charity led at the time by the then-chair of the Teaching Council. RNZ was initially refused the figures under the Official Information Act. Competition among providers is healthy. Opaque allocation to a provider connected to the regulator is not.
What happens next
Stanford has a genuinely good programme and a lucky tailwind. The test comes when unemployment falls and career-changers have better options again. If the bursary keeps them coming, the policy has earned its keep. If enrolments slump the way they did in 2022, New Zealand will have mistaken a recession for a workforce strategy, again. The government should publish completion and classroom-readiness data for onsite trainees now, and run a transparent contest for places, before the cycle turns and the argument becomes academic.
Sources
- Newstalk ZB: “No-brainer”: High unemployment may be driving more Kiwis to teaching (2026-10-08)
- RNZ: Plan to boost teacher training announced by Education (2026-02-27)
- RNZ: Government spending $21.7m to expand teacher training in classrooms (2026-08-03)
- RNZ: Universities feel out of favour over ‘shambolic’ teacher training funding (2026-07-24)
- Education Workforce: School Onsite Training Programme (2026-08-21)
- Ministry of Education: Teacher Demand and Supply 2024 Report released (2025-06-06)
- PPTA: Commentary on unqualified teachers and curriculum reform timing (2026)
- Education Review Office: Findings on new teacher preparedness (2024)
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