What’s good for kids who need learning support is good for all kids

The announcement of $646 million for learning support was reported as Budget 2025’s good news story, but it would be more accurate to describe it as a mixed bag. There could be a lot less smoke and mirrors about what is being provided and what has been discontinued to pay for the ‘new and improved’ learning support.

It was helpful the Government acknowledged long-standing under-funding, real gaps in the provision of learning support that have led to despair and disruption. They had to. Several reviews over recent years have made it clear the learning support needed a radical overhaul.

There were two items of genuinely hopeful news announced in the Budget in relation to learning support: increased funding for the Ongoing Resourcing Scheme and continuation of early intervention services through to the end of Year 1.

The Ongoing Resourcing Scheme is a strand of “targeted funding” that came out of Special Education 2000, New Zealand’s first systematic approach to inclusive education, aimed at children in primary and secondary schools assessed as high or very high needs.

The problem has been that eligibility was applied for through a process called ‘verification’ for a contestable fund that was capped at one percent of children at any one time, regardless of the number of children who met the criteria.

The result has been that some children who met the criteria were not ‘verified’ as eligible, and their school wouldn’t get the funding. Which meant the schools were unable to meet the needs of the neurodivergent children and children with disabilities in their community, and consequently, their families.

Urban legend and actual practice led to an understanding that the most effective way to secure any funding was to paint the worst picture possible of each child at the centre of the application; teachers and families find this process of ‘deficit framing’ traumatic and painful.

The “structural change to the ORS funding model” announced in Budget 2025 means every student who is verified as having extra learning needs will now be funded. Education Minister Erica Stanford estimated that another 1700 students would benefit from this change over the next four years.

And the provision of early intervention services to the end of Year 1 should mean more services and give parents, families, teachers and schools greater confidence at the start of a child’s primary education.

Intervention services are crucial. They can include speech and language therapy, supporting families to better understand their child’s behaviour, or visits from an education support worker to the child at school. Until now these services were only provided in early childhood education. The Government extending it to Year 1 is a much-needed step in the right direction.

Hopefully the result of both changes in policy will mean more schools will be able to accept a neurodivergent or disabled child at the start of primary school.

Less certain is what the Budget is actually promising in terms of increased funding for teacher aides in schools. It says: “Key investments include substantial annual increases to teacher aide hours, building up to over two million additional teacher aide hours per year, from 2028.”

But what does two million extra hours mean in the real world? Currently teacher aide funding is part of the Ongoing Resourcing Scheme. If a child meets the criteria for ‘high needs’ or ‘very high needs’, the school gets some additional support in the form of itinerant teachers, as well as teacher aide hours. The greatest amount of support is for those considered to have ‘very high needs’, funding for up to 20 hours from a teacher aide. If schools need teacher aide time in the classroom or other parts of the school, the school must fund those hours.

Currently, teacher aides are usually part time. If they work full time, they might work up to 30 hours per week in a primary or secondary school, for up to 40 weeks a year.

The maths suggests the Budget is promising an additional 1667 teacher aides. But New Zealand has 2,500 primary, intermediate and secondary schools. That means the Budget allows for fewer than one additional aide per school. This is far short of the primary teacher union’s call for a teacher aide in every classroom.

This is a profession dominated by women, and their average hourly pay is $28. It is more than ironic that the funding used for this meagre increase in the Budget likely comes from the changes to the Equal Pay Act announced immediately before the Budget’s release.

There have been a number of reviews of learning support particularly in high needs, which have come to similar conclusions. Research conducted by the New Zealand Council of Education Research found that the process of accessing funding was difficult, poor information was provided, and funding was often made available too late and was too little. Work carried out by the NZ Educational Institute primary teacher union found that for every seven children who had some support, another three had unmet needs.

We still don’t have any idea of what the promised “overview” of the system will look like, but we would reasonably expect that it will draw on previous work that had already been done on it.

The minister and Ministry of Education still claim to be in support of developing an inclusive education system. We’ve yet to see how this year’s Budget supports this aspiration.

Another example of reprioritisation is $30m to be spent on enlarging specialist day schools. On June 5 the minister announced: “We know many parents of children with high needs want the option of a specialist education setting … This investment is about giving families more choice and confidence their children can learn in the environment that best supports them.”

At least some of this funding will come from the disestablishment of the teachers who support literacy development, which is estimated to save $39m.

Our research, and research from the Education Review Office, has repeatedly shown that families with disabled children have not been given genuine access to the same schools available to children who don’t have disabilities.

There has been a constant undermining of an inclusive education system. Concerns have long been expressed the safety of students in segregated settings such as that reported in the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in State Care which, as reported in Newsroom, includes case studies and comments relating to abuse suffered by people at specialist residential schools.

Numerous evaluations of the three residential specialist schools in New Zealand have noted the schools were funded as if they were fully enrolled (84 students) not on the actual number of students (in the 30s). Every other school in New Zealand is funded on the actual enrolment figures.

Our research has clearly demonstrated the value of inclusive education, for neurodiverse children and children with disabilities, and also in building an inclusive society. Inclusive education gives everyone the chance to get to know and be comfortable with the variety of members of our communities.

What is good for those who need learning support is good for everyone going through our school system.