Education Minister announces $30m to be put towards new classrooms at state-integrated schools
Photo:
RNZ / Mark Papalii
The Education Minister has announced $30 million will be put towards new classrooms at state-integrated schools.
State-integrated schools receive government funding including to maintain buildings and receive less funding than state schools.
The schools could have a distinct religious or philosophical approach, and accounted for about 11 percent of enrolments in Aotearoa.
Education Minister Erica Stanford said state-integrated schools played an important part of the system, and the government was ensuring they had the support to meet growing demand.
She made the announcement at Sacred Heart Cathedral School, across the road from Parliament, on Thursday morning.
"It's something that's been a long time coming. We are a government that is interested in choice in education.
"We know that there is a huge demand for state integrated schools like the one that we're at today, and there hasn't been a huge amount of money that has been made available for property for these schools. In fact, the last injection was in 2019, and it was only $6 million."
The $30m will be phased in over four years, and was expected to mean state-integrated schools could take on 1250 more students. Stanford said the funding approach was different from the usual, but the money would come from the new build package in
this year's Budget
.
"We've done things slightly differently this time where we are saying to school boards 'we're going to make the funds available to you so that we can use capital funding'.
"It's the money that we've set aside in the budget to increase student numbers for state integrated schools."
Stanford said the government would take applications from state-integrated schools for building funds, and make decisions based on their attendance, achievement rates, and roll to assess demand.
The type of special character would not be part of the equation, she said, but the government would take account of
donations the schools might be seeking
to enable them to provide smaller classes and better facilities than state schools.
"We will take that into account when we are going through this. But most of the schools who are asking for donations are doing a very small amount and it's for property."
The buildings would be owned by the proprietors of the school, she said.
"In this case, it will be the school boards who own the buildings that we providing the capital for - and that's not unusual, we do that across the state sector where quite often school boards will own their own property that they've fundraised for.
"The way we're doing this is just to - in the times that we're in - that we're able to find some capital money to help schools. So we're doing things a little bit differently but all it means is more student places and more parent choice."
Integrated schools were owned by a third party such as a church diocese and had a special character, such as Catholic religion, which most of its enrolments must meet.
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