The hole our schools are in
Schools need a cash injection of more than $1 billion to absorb a surge in student numbers and repair ailing buildings, the Government says.
Education Minister Chris Hipkins has revealed to Stuff details of what he claims is a funding shortfall left by the previous Government. He and Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern have been hinting at funding issues with school property for months.
Hipkins said there would be an extra 16,690 students in classrooms by 2020 and the previous government had made no budget plans for this.
In total, $1.1b in capital spending was needed to cover population growth particularly in Auckland, Hamilton and Tauranga; the Christchurch schools rebuild; and urgent repair work at schools with uninhabitable buildings.
In some cases, the schools would need to grow upwards, rather than outwards, making them higher density environments.
The additional students would also necessitate extra spending on more teachers, resources and operational spending, he said.
‘‘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,’’ Hipkins said.
National’s education spokeswoman Nikki Kaye said investing in school property to get ahead of growth was a priority under the National government. In the 2017 Budget, $240 million had been allocated to fund another 4000 student places.
An Auckland Education Growth Plan had been due to go to Cabinet in November last year before the Government changed, Kaye said.
Hipkins said his Government had inherited about $3.5b of forecast spending through to the
2020/21 Budget. But it wasn’t enough to deal with immediate problems, let alone future ones, he said.
Over the next three Budgets,
$929m was needed to cover the cost of new schools and classrooms and to meet the cost of the Christchurch rebuild. The remaining $166m was needed for urgent remediation and demolition of classrooms and buildings that are unusable.
‘‘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,’’ Hipkins said.
While the operational funding schools need is separate to money needed for buildings, it is affected by the same problems.
‘‘Teacher salaries and teacher supply are an integral part of meeting the forecast growth and it is a significant number of extra teachers needed for that capital,’’ Hipkins said.
Teachers need to be trained and that takes time – even fast-track programmes like Teach First can’t be used to fill every new position that is going to be needed.
In March, Hipkins announced a complete overhaul of the education system, which meant reviewing the Tomorrow’s Schools model that handed greater responsibility and freedom to school boards of trustees.
That 30-year-old model was part of the problem being seen today with rundown school property, Hipkins said.
‘‘I think it’s fair to say school property has not been well managed for at least 30 years. For a period of time the Ministry of Education played a minimal role in school property management and that led to some schools being really badly run down.’’
The Labour-led Government has repeatedly claimed it has inherited major funding problems from its predecessor. It has pointed to deficits at district health boards and a blo out in the cost of earthquake re-repairs in Christchurch. It has at the same time said it won’t be able to fund everything it promised in the election campaign as soon as it had hoped.
Hipkins again pointed the finger at the National-led government, saying it needed to accept ‘‘the lion’s share of the blame’’ for ‘‘not properly allowing for population growth’’.
‘‘This would have been something the previous government would have and should have been aware of,’’ Hipkins said. But Kaye said National had increased investment in school property by more than $5b over nine years despite financial pressure like the global financial crisis and Canterbury earthquakes.
Last year, the auditor-general reported that ‘‘in the last 10 years, capital expenditure in the school sector has grown significantly’’ and that ‘‘ministry has considerably strengthened its approach to managing school property in the last 10 years’’, she said.
World-leading. First-class. Superior. These are all words associated with New Zealand’s education system – it’s something teachers, leaders and politicians rightly dine out on and as a country we’re all very proud of.
But what’s the point in having a first-class curriculum, high-quality teachers and inspirational leaders if the buildings and classrooms our students are learning in are in some cases falling apart around them.
Most Kiwis can look back at their time at school and remember a horrible prefab building they spent cold winters in, which despite promises it was only temporary, was still there five years later when they left high school.
Those days should be the old days.
New Zealand is a small country doing big things on the international stage, yet we still have students learning in staffrooms, gymnasiums and libraries because actual classrooms are unusable or in some cases boarded up.
When it comes to the Government prioritising spending at the Budget there’s a lot to weigh up.
Every minister would argue their portfolio area is worthy of more money but if you asked the average person on the street what they thought was important, chances are they’d say housing, health and education.
In the same way every Kiwi should expect a warm and dry home, they should also expect a warm and dry classroom for their children and grandchildren to learn in.
Figures revealed by Education Minister Chris Hipkins show there’s a hole of about $1.1 billion in the education system currently for school buildings and classrooms alone.
There’s an additional almost 17,000 students expected to flood schools in the next three years, there is not enough funding set aside for the Christchurch schools rebuild, and there’s a number of school buildings and classrooms at the worst end of the remediation scale that need repairing or demolishing.
It’s a lot of money to find but it has to be found because students need the best environment to learn in and the best teachers in the world won’t be enough to counter an inadequate – borderline uninhabitable – classroom.
Of course we have some great buildings and classrooms in New Zealand. We see examples everyday of the best technology and creative spaces you couldn’t have dreamed of in the ‘‘old days’’. But the minority loves to ruin it for the majority and, like housing and hospitals, you can have loads of top-class examples but it’s the rundown ones with mould and asbestos that everyone remembers.
New Zealand has had its fair share of bad luck, with copious natural disasters to deal with, and even the best classrooms unfortunately doesn’t often survive the biggest of floods or the severest of earthquakes.
But we’re a resilient country and pretty good at starting from scratch and rebuilding.
There’s a chunk of the education system that needs some love from the Budget later this month, because if the country’s schools don’t get the firstclass attention some of them desperately need, we might find that world-class title we hold so dearly starting to slip away.