Are we still world-leading or first-class?

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.