Winners in the business of education

The Government has budgeted more than $20 billion for education this year. Who is making money out of this? Our latest investigative series, the Business of Education, aims to discover the answer. Over the coming months, a team of journalists will scrutinise Aotearoa’s education system through a commercial lens.

Statistics New Zealand data shows education and training is our 10thbiggest industry, contributing $15.5b to gross domestic product in the year ended March 2022. The Ministry of Education manages payroll for 100,000 school staff, and Stats NZ data shows more than 222,000 people work in the sector.

And as our first story reveals, the ministry is a major client for consulting firms.

Through schools, the Government also tenders major service contracts for everything from buses to school lunches. It manages our secondlargest social property portfolio of 16,000 school buildings with a book value of $30.3b.

We want to look at the economics of school provisions such as uniforms and the like. But our team isn’t just looking at the formal school years.

BusinessDesk will analyse the opportunities education has created for our major tech companies and early childhood education.

We will scrutinise the multinationals, charities, iwi players and listed firms that are stakeholders across all learning providers.

Our education providers, their assets, their investments, how they make money and how they spend it will all be unearthed.

At the tertiary level, we will be looking at the financial stability of universities and untangling the mess that was Te Pū kenga.

We will also look at the tertiary sector’s contribution to our innovation economy and the companies that were once university research projects.