Week 5 - August 22 - 25

​Teachers Union Meeting: Friday 9 September, 1:30 - 3pm

NZEI Te Riu Roa and PPTA are calling joint whole-of-sector paid union meetings for teachers to get informed about the proposals and decide on their next steps.

While school officially remains open all students are encouraged to be picked up from 1pm onwards. There will only be a skeleton staff available to supervise students in the hall or library for the last hour after lunchtime on that Friday. A notice will come home so you can let us know what time suits you for pickup that day.

Global Budget - School funding proposed directions for change by Government

There are seven key components that lie at the heart of the proposed directions that the Education Minister has been discussing with a sector group (with representation from the Secondary Principals' Association, Principals' Federation, School Trustees, Kindergartens NZ, PPTA & NZEI (secondary and primary teachers unions) and the Early Childhood Council. The proposals are:

1. a standard per child funding amount tailored to the learning expectations of children and young people at each stage of their education journey, rather than based on their age and year level
2. an additional funding amount for children and young people most at risk of educational under-achievement to replace the current decile-based system for both early childhood education services and schooling.
3. supplementary funding to support a network of smaller and isolated early childhood education services and schools.
4. establishing a global budget for delivering teaching and learning in all schools. This has the potential to increase flexibility in schools’ use of funding while simplifying funding arrangements.
5. Separating funding for property-related costs to provide opportunities for more efficient management of school property, while also helping school leaders to focus on teaching and learning, rather than property.
6. Developing clear expectations and greater accountability for the educational progress of all children and young people.
7. Directly linking the private school subsidy to the marginal cost of educating children and young people in the state schooling sector to provide greater certainty for families and private schools about future funding levels.

Both the secondary and the primary unions, with support from the primary, secondary and intermediate principal groups have united in their opposition to the proposal point number 4. This global budget proposal would let schools trade funding for teachers for money they could then spend on other things.

Principals Federation president Iain Taylor, who is one of those advising the government on the review, said the federation opposed the global budget proposal because it removed guarantees around the minimum number of teachers each school would have.

"The global budget is removing the guaranteed staffing and that's the biggest bugbear from our perspective, so where are those principles of equity when a school has no guarantee of any set staffing. That's a real massive concern."

Another advisory group member, Association of Intermediate and Middle Schooling president Doug McLean, said his organisation could not see the point of the global budget because schools already had a lot of flexibility over their staffing.

"The best resource for teaching and learning is the teacher, and I wouldn't like to see teacher time traded off for other things - I think education is too important for that and global budgets could dilute the quality of teaching and learning."

​Secondary Principals Association president Sandy Pasley said she could see possible disadvantages to the scheme and no benefits.

"It really isn't going to offer secondary principals any new things they can't already do and so consequently we are not jumping for joy about the global budget at all," she said.

"There are also some disadvantages that we can see and it's probably not something we are supporting at the moment."

All three principals said the proposal was a form of bulk funding.

(Note: All information, quotes and links in this post are collated from Ministry of Education; Radio New Zealand & PPTA/NZEI)

Principals against funding proposal

Impact for Schools & Boards

Funding Systems Review Engagement: Facts and Figures