Opinion: Under-investment in learning support is hurting our most vulnerable children

There is another, much smaller, deficit that is nevertheless critical to the future of Aotearoa New Zealand — it’s in the education system. Photo / Getty Images

THREE KEY FACTS

• NZEI report suggests a $2.5 billion deficit in learning support after decades of under-investment.
• Cabinet paper from July 2023 says high-needs students experiencing “persistent barriers to being present and being able to participate, progress and achieve in their education journey”.
• Call for the Government to put politics aside and work toward a bipartisan, long-term solution to New Zealand’s learning support deficit.

There is a growing awareness that public investment in infrastructure has lagged for decades, creating a massive ‘infrastructure deficit’ that has been estimated to be anywhere between $200 billion and $1 trillion. While such eyewatering figures are enough to startle most of us, the impact it is having on our politicians is — for now at least — promising.

It’s not often politicians agree on a problem, let alone one of that magnitude. It’s rarer still they rise above the tiresome game of partisan politicking to reach for real, cross-party solutions. For now, at least, we can hold out hope that fixing the infrastructure deficit will grow into a genuine bipartisan approach that is spared from the blood sport of electioneering.

There is another, much smaller, deficit that is nevertheless critical to the future of Aotearoa New Zealand — it’s in the education system, and it’s what I would call our ‘learning support deficit’.

Supports neglected

Learning support is the additional support we give to learners to enable them to access education. It ranges from simple support for children having difficulties with aspects of the curriculum, such as literacy or things including behaviour, to more comprehensive support for children with high and complex needs.

The learning support deficit is a result of decades of under-investment and neglect of supports for learners with additional and complex needs. A report released today by education union NZEI Te Riu Roa sizes it at $2.5 billion.

Don’t get me wrong, there have been efforts to address the issue, but they have most often been ad hoc, incomplete, and insufficient to address growing levels of student need.

Take former associate education minister Tracey Martin’s inspired Learning Support Coordinator (LSC) policy, the first tranche of which was rolled out in 2019. This placed 623 LSCs into just over 1000 schools nationally, at a cost of $217m over four years. LSCs work alongside teachers, specialist providers and parents to ensure ākonga (learners) get what they need.

The LSC policy was one of the single biggest investments in learning support in decades. A comprehensive evaluation commissioned by the Ministry of Education found LSCs to be a “high value investment” that successfully met the intended outcomes of the policy and improved the ability of schools to identify and respond to student need.

Roll-out that stopped

What a win. The problem was tranche two of the LSC rollout never got off the ground. It was never clear why. Was it a Covid-19 casualty? Did the rollout end when Labour’s landslide 2020 election victory meant they no longer needed the support of Martin’s party, New Zealand First? Either way, some six years on, the resource remains unevenly spread across the country. Every day, thousands of children are denied access to this support simply because their school missed out on the first tranche of a policy that was never fully implemented. That is clearly not fair.

The real scandal here, however, is that the LSC policy is a rare example of something actually being done to help some of our most in-need tamariki. Most work on learning support spends its entire life in the wasteland of pilot programmes or worse, literature reviews and discussion papers. Anyone as brave and boring as me can look through the Ministry of Education’s database of reports on their Education Counts website or scour through the archives of the Education Review Office and find report after report, and review after review, of well-researched analysis that successfully articulates the problem.

Reviews are cheap, but solutions rarely are. Our learning support system, and ultimately the hundreds of thousands of children it is supposed to serve, have been waiting far too long for a government with the courage to step in with substantial, long-term investment.

Quietly hopeful

For a while, it looked like Labour, under the direction of then-minister of education Jan Tinetti were stepping up to the plate. Their Highest Needs Review took a wide view, engaged stakeholders at every level, and considered the system in all its complexity. Many of us with an interest in these issues were quietly hopeful. Then, in 2023, as the country was bracing for an election, the Government blinked. Progress implementing the findings of the review ground to a halt. Within a year, incoming Education Minister Erica Stanford had disestablished the team looking after the work programme, and all hopes were dashed.

But the problem hasn’t gone away. It has worsened. I have the privilege of frequently speaking with principals, teachers and learning support specialists. They all tell me the same thing — the learning support needs of students have increased dramatically over the past few years. They all have their theories – Covid, cyclone-related trauma, screens — but we don’t need to wait until we identify the cause to provide the help students need.

We spend upwards of $1.3b on learning support every year, and that is money well spent, but it is not enough. The Highest Needs Review established that as a matter of fact. The final cabinet paper emerging from the Highest Needs Review, dated July 2023, said despite current levels of investment, ‘students with the highest needs are still experiencing persistent barriers to being present and being able to participate, progress and achieve in their education journey’. In the same cabinet paper, the section on ‘financial implications’ is completely redacted, apparently not safe for public consumption.

In my view, investing in learning support in a major way, so every student can participate fully in their education is as sure an investment as the roads we drive on and the pipes beneath our feet. The simple fact is that politicians of many stripes have failed these students for far too long. Perhaps it is time for the Government to rise above the politics and, as seems to be the case for infrastructure, work toward a bipartisan, long-term solution to the decades-long learning support deficit.

Dr Shannon Walsh is a strategic researcher for the NZ Educational Institute Te Riu Roa and a former lecturer at the University of Auckland.