Berhampore School principal Mark Potter. Photo: RNZ / John Gerritsen
Schools are expecting more support for disabled students in this week's government Budget.
Education Minister Erica Stanford has told the sector to expect a "learning support Budget" and leaks show she has been planning to can a major education initiative to bankroll at least some of the spending.
Learning support has been a consistent pressure point for schools.
This week a report warned students could die because of a lack of resourcing and last month teacher union the Educational Institute Te Riu Roa urged the government to boost spending on learning support by nearly $800 million a year.
Berhampore School principal and NZEI immediate past president Mark Potter was once rebuked for using property funding to assist pupils with disabilities.
He told RNZ learning support funding was what schools needed the most from the Budget, but his hopes were not high.
"We hear a lot of talk about there being something about learning support in here, but we've got decades of just talk. Just shifting a bit of resource from here to there is not what we need. What we really need is some serious, genuine long-term investment like the military just got, but we've been waiting longer," he said.
Three separate leaks, two to RNZ and one to the Labour Party, indicated at least some of the money for learning support would come from axing the Kāhui Ako scheme, which paid 4000 teachers extra to guide training and collaboration in groups of schools.
That would divert as much as $118m a year to help for disabled learners.
Kāhui Ako had strong support from some principals but Waikato Principals Association president Lesley Lomas said there was only so much money to go around and learning support was a big issue.
"It's a priority for all of us. We have consistently been asking for support in this area so we realise there's not a new bit of pie, we probably have to make some adjustments from one area of the education sector to another," she said.
The government had already announced extra funding in other problem areas for schools.
Truancy would receive an extra $140m over four years, nearly half of it taken from other education schemes, and maths teaching would receive $100m, also over four years.
In the early learning sector, Early Childhood Council chief executive Simon Laube said centres were closing because of the gap between government subsidies and the cost of running an early childhood service.
"Areas where their families are struggling are not doing very well. It's very hard to run a viable centre in any community where the families can't contribute anything to make up the shortfall in funding to make some of these policies work," he said.
Laube said the council's members were nervous about the Budget and were hoping for an increase in government subsidies and no surprises.
At the other end of the education system, universities feared a temporary four percent funding increase designed to help them through a tough couple of years would be allowed to lapse.
Chris Whelan from Universities New Zealand last year said that would be catastrophic.
This week he told RNZ it would hurt, but universities were prepared.
"We've been given high-level messages not to expect much or all of it to continue. Probably the best thing is having those early messages meant that universities have been able to take decisions with that in mind. It's going to be tough if it's not maintained but universities have now built it into some of their assumptions. We've essentially had six to eight months to prepare for it," he said.
Meanwhile, the government wanted to stand up a new industry training system and some individual polytechnics from the remains of mega-institute Te Pukenga next year.
Whether there was enough in Te Pukenga's kitty to bankroll that or if it would require additional funding was a question the Budget should answer.
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