Children with disabilities and behavioural problems are at the front of the queue for increased government funding, Education Minister Chris Hipkins says.
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Mr Hipkins also told RNZ's Nine to Noon programme the factors causing the current teacher shortage are likely to worsen, and he wants this year's review of the NCEA qualification to consider the problem of league tables of school results.
Mr Hipkins said the government was planning to increase spending on education.
"Education is one of our government's biggest priorities so you'll see education prioritised in terms of the overall spending picture," he said.
Mr Hipkins said there was a lot of demand within the education sector for increased funding and government would not be able to meet all demands. However special education, also known as learning support, was "right at the front of the queue".
He said the government would not redirect learning support funding from older teenagers to early childhood as the previous National-led government had planned.
"That means putting more money into the learning support system," he said.
Mr Hipkins said the government was looking for ways to alleviate the teacher shortage but warned that the situation could get worse.
"We've been training fewer teachers in recent years while the population has been increasing and a very large cohort of teachers, the baby boomer teachers, are nearing retirement," he said.
"So all three of those things have converged to create what I think is going to be an even greater problem in coming years to what it is now, so we've got a lot of work to do a very rapid catch-up."
Mr Hipkins said the government was looking for new ways to train teachers and had waived the $4000 fee for the "refresh" course that many teachers returning to the workforce must complete.
He said more people needed to enrol in teacher education courses and the government would consider expanding the Teach First programme that trained teachers while they were working in classrooms.
Mr Hipkins acknowledged that teacher pay would also have to be considered and teacher unions had high hopes for pay bargaining scheduled for later this year.
"We can't make up for 10 years of under-funding in a single pay round and so I think they're going to have to be reasonable. We're going to have to work together to create a long-term track that deals with their pay issues," he said.
Mr Hipkins said socio-economic factors and the national standards in reading, writing and maths had contributed to New Zealand's falling scores in international tests of children's literacy and numeracy.
He said a focus on NCEA league tables and government targets had prompted some schools to over-assess students or enter students for a "grab bag" of credits that did not lead them toward a clear career or further education.
"They're being massively over-assessed because the culture has been about accumulating credits," Mr Hipkins said.
He said too many teenagers were leaving school and failing to find work or enrol in tertiary courses.
"I want to make sure that what they're doing at school leads them somewhere. I don't want a single one of them walking out the school gate and going home and doing nothing," Mr Hipkins said.
He said the government agreed in principle with the previous government's use of data to identify groups of children who potentially required the most help, but would not limit assistance only to those students.
"You're not going to see us using social investment as a form of rationing," he said.
