Boost for school health services
Child wellbeing spending may limit kitty for teachers
Thursday’s “Wellbeing Budget” looks set to fund school nurses, counsellors and driving instructors — leaving a limited pot for teachers. Child wellbeing will be central to a government which Finance Minister Grant Robertson has said “will measure its success by how well we improve the living standards and wellbeing of all New Zealanders”.
But if your focus is child wellbeing, then your approach to budgeting for education needs to be much wider than just making sure all children have high-quality teachers.
We can expect to see other initiatives, which have been on the Government’s agenda since it took office in 2017, come to the fore this year.
Mental health will be a top Budget priority, and that could mean delivering on promises to fund more school nurses, pilot counsellors in primary schools and implement a promised “action plan” for learning support.
Another priority is “lifting Ma¯ori and Pacific incomes, skills and opportunities”. That could be the framework under which the Budget might deliver on a promise to fund driving instruction for high school students, given that Ma¯ori and Pacific young people are far less likely than average to have driver’s licences that they need for most jobs.
Overall education spending will rise, probably heftily, but it will still be constrained both by the demands of other portfolios and by a need to plan for potentially even bigger education costs in future years arising from Bali Haque’s taskforce on school governance, which is due to present its final report by June 30.
The Speech from the Throne in November 2017, which listed the new coalition Government’s plans,
School nurses are currently funded only in the poorest three deciles.
promised “an additional $6 billion over four years” in education.
A quarter of that, $1.5b, was budgeted last year for scrapping fees for every student’s first year of fulltime tertiary study or two years of industry training.
Robertson said this month that $197 million (12.6 per cent) has been chopped off the four-year funding because of below-forecast student numbers, and will be diverted to reforming vocational training.
Education Minister Chris Hipkins unveiled a draft plan in February to bring all vocational education, including polytechnic and work-based training, under a new national institute with a unified funding system. The $197m may be enough to cover the transitional and ongoing costs of the change.
The Speech from the Throne promised a bit more than another quarter of the $6b — $1.8b over four years — to “deliver more teachers, better professional development and more learning resources”.
Despite a desperate teacher shortage, only a fraction of this has been allocated so far to recruiting and training more teachers — $9.5m in December 2017, $10.5m last October and $95m over four years announced this month.
The Ministry of Education says its pay offers to primary and secondary teachers would cost $1.2b over four years — an “envelope” that Hipkins has stuck to in the face of tomorrow’s planned “mega-strike” by teachers.
Labour’s 2017 manifesto promised “school-based health services in all public secondary schools” to help reduce New Zealand’s appalling youth suicide rate. School nurses are currently funded only in the poorest three deciles, and Labour proposed a $40m-a-year plan to fund 240 nurse hours per 100 students a year in all high schools.
The Speech from the Throne contained only a vaguer promise to “put more nurses in schools”.
Labour’s coalition deal with NZ First promised to “pilot counsellors in primary schools”.
A pilot programme has started in Canterbury and the Counsellors’ Association’s schools spokeswoman, Jean Andrews, says counsellors want it extended to at least intermediate schools nationally.