Schools’ $1b budget gap is ‘eye-watering’

Schools across the country are going to be flooded by students over the next three years, some classrooms are unusable and Christchurch’s school rebuild coffers are running dry.

This is just the tip of the iceberg of problems the education system is facing and the Government says it is grappling with finding more than $1 billion to deal with it.

By 2020 there will be an extra 16,690 students in classrooms and Education Minister Chris Hipkins says there has been absolutely no forward planning for dealing with that sort of influx.

The Government is on the hunt for $1.1b in capital expenditure alone in the education system to allow for population growth particularly in Auckland, Hamilton and Tauranga; the Christchurch schools rebuild; and urgent repair work on uninhabitable school buildings. With more students comes the need for more teachers, resources and operational spending so the $1.1b will only solve part of a problem that Hipkins has described as ‘‘eye-watering’’.

‘‘You always expect population growth and there would be some movement around that but $1.1b is a significant amount of money that we would have at least considered to be flagged up as an issue for the future and it wasn’t.’’ In the case of the Christchurch schools rebuild, Hipkins says $1b was promised to the Canterbury region to deal with it but was never put aside. Over the next three budgets $929 million is needed to cover the cost of new schools and classrooms for the almost 17,000 students coming into the system and to meet the true cost of the Christchurch rebuild. The remaining $166m is for urgent repairs and demolition of classrooms and buildings.

The previous Government did pump cash into capital expenditure and Hipkins said he picked up about $3.5b of forecast spending through to the 2020/21 budget.

But it is not enough to deal with immediate problems let alone future ones.

‘‘The capital component is obviously significantly greater than the operational component because the capital you’re typically funding upfront, whereas the operating component is spread out over the 13 years students will be in the education system.

‘‘Clearly we can’t pump $1.1b in, in one year, but we know over this term of government this is the challenge we’re going to have to face,’’ he said.

While schools’ operational funding is separate to money needed for buildings, it is affected. ‘‘Teacher salaries and teacher supply are an integral part of meeting the forecast growth,’’ Hipkins said.

He lays the lack of planning around population growth squarely at the feet of the previous National-led government.

‘‘Political responsibility for the first part of the problem is shared ... but not properly allowing for population growth is something the last government needs to accept the lion’s share of the blame for.’’