Last Thursday a central government Funding Advisory Group advised that the global budget proposal be dropped from the Funding Review, with six other recommendations including taking a per-child approach to funding, additional funding for those most at risk of under-achievement, supplementary funding for small and isolated schools and better accountability for student achievement.
Minister of Education Hekia Parata said in a release she was "not surprised" by the Group's recommendation that the global budget not proceed to the next stage of policy development.
"The Group's report, and together with feedback from around 90 regional meetings with teachers and principals, will help inform my report to Cabinet on the options to take forward."
PPTA spokesman Jack Boyd criticised the Minister at the event for not outright rejecting the global budget, despite being unable to find any major party who supported it.
He said the formulae which currently restricts the student-teacher ratio and saw government pay teachers directly was a crucial protection to avoid class sizes swelling and quality of education declining.
"If this is removed school will have no guaranteed minimum number of teachers to be paid for directly by the government, and that is exactly what this proposal does," he said.
He said by schools determining the split between staffing and cash there were fears that schools might respond to rising costs in other sectors by cutting support staff or teachers.
"Prudent school leaders will be highly unlikely to ever make a permanent appointment of a teacher because they would be at the financial risk when positions go."
Mr Boyd said government were motivated by monetary savings and the proposal would help facilitate the privatisation of New Zealand's education system.
Ms Parata said the global budget was one of seven proposals for improving the current education funding systems and was all about flexibility for schools to make decisions about how they use their funding in the best interests of their students.
"It has nothing to do with "laying the path for privatisation of education" and comments like that make it quite clear that there is significant misrepresentation of what is actually proposed," she said.
"Our Government continues to prioritise children and young people getting a good education. That's why we have increased funding for schooling by around 35% and more than doubled funding to early childhood, since we've been in Government."
Mr Boyd said at the offset of the Review Prime Minister John Key stated if the sector didn't like proposals they would not be progressed, a statement Mr Boyd said he was wavering on.
"The Ministry has had its road show, now it's time we had ours."
Speaking on behalf of the NZEI Jan Tinetti said teachers could not leave children's education to chance, and that the removal of hard-fought protections like the central funding of teachers could not be allowed to be degraded.
"In fact we actually need to fight to extend central funding to support staff and ECC [Early Childhood Education] workers as well."
She said the proposed global budget and establishment of online schools represented a cost-cutting war on public education.
The meeting was one of more than 50 held nationwide on the issue.