Education Minister Erica Stanford will make the pre-Budget announcement on Monday afternoon. Photo / Mark Mitchell
Lifting primary school students’ mathematics skills will be a focus of Budget 2026, with Education Minister Erica Stanford expected to this afternoon unveil a significant investment in classroom resources and support for teachers.
It comes as new results show an “encouraging” improvement in Year 6 students’ maths ability. While Stanford told the Herald there is still “a long way to go”, she said things are heading in the right direction.
Monday’s pre-Budget announcement is expected to include a hefty investment aimed at primary schools. The Government says it will get more resources to students, support teachers and embed the ongoing education reforms.
It will include a new assessment of Year 5 students’ knowledge of times tables and division. That’s intended to help teachers spot gaps in kids’ learning earlier and inform parents about how their children are progressing.
Alongside the funding announcement, Stanford will highlight new results from the Curriculum Insights and Progress Study (CIPS). It monitors Year 3, 6 and 8 students’ progress in reading, writing and maths, and is run by the University of Otago and the New Zealand Council for Educational Research.
The maths results show what is deemed a “statistically significant” increase in Year 6 students meeting or exceeding curriculum expectations. In 2025, this reached 36%, which is up from 30% in 2024 and 28% in 2023.
The Government notes this follows the reform of maths in primary schools, with a new structured maths curriculum, resources and professional development for teachers introduced last year. The CIPS assessment occurred in Term 4, so about three-and-a-half terms after the reforms began.
“These are still early results and there is a long way to go, but after years of decline, this is encouraging,” Stanford told the Herald.
“We know from the Education Review Office report in October 2025 that 98% of schools had started teaching the refreshed maths curriculum in 2025 and 85% of teachers reported that they had changed how they teach maths,“ she said.
“These results are a testament to the incredible work of teachers and leaders in our school embedding these reforms every day in their classrooms.”
Stanford said the results suggested “we may be starting to head in the right direction”.
“No one is pretending the job is done. Achievement levels are still far below where we want them to be. But seeing statistically significant improvement matters.”
The results for Year 3 and Year 8 students have also improved, but not to a degree which is deemed “statistically significant”. For Year 3, it’s increased from 20% in 2023 to 25% in 2025, and for Year 8 from 22% to 24%.
One of the Government’s core targets is having 80% of Year 8 students at or above their expected curriculum level for their age in reading, writing and maths by December 2030. This is measured through the CIPS results.
A noteworthy result from the CIPS is that the percentage of Year 3 students more than one year behind curriculum expectations has had a statistically significant change. It’s fallen from 45% in 2023 to 38% in 2025.
Distinguished Professor Gaven Martin, the former chair of an expert advisory panel for the Royal Society on refreshing the maths curriculum, said the results were “compelling”.
“Percentages fail to capture the real human impact of these achievements,” Martin said, in a comment provided through Stanford’s office.
“There are about 70,000 Year 6 students. With 6% more ... now succeeding in mathematics, that’s about 4200 students.
“If these results hold up across the sector, and there is no reason they should not, then that is many tens of thousands of students, perhaps one hundred thousand students, now succeeding in mathematics who would otherwise have been regarded as failing, with all the poor life consequences that entails.”
The Government’s Make It Count maths programme was launched at the start of 2025, including a new curriculum for students in Year 0-8 and additional resource.
Ahead of it, Prime Minister Christopher Luxon said the 2023 math results for Year 8 students represented “a total system failure”.
“These figures are appalling but I suspect not a surprise for many parents who I know are frustrated and despondent about the progress of their children,” Luxon said.
While Luxon said this required “swift action to transform maths education”, some educators have since said the speed and scale of curriculum changes, including those outside maths, have been a lot to take on.
Jamie Ensor is the NZ Herald’s chief political reporter, based in the press gallery at Parliament. He was previously a TV reporter and digital producer in the Newshub press gallery office. He was a finalist in 2025 for Political Journalist of the Year at the Voyager Media Awards.