Education spending
September 12th, 2012 at 1:00 pm by David FarrarRadio NZ reports:
An annual report on education by the OECD says the Government spends more of its budget on education than any of the other 33 countries in the organisation.
The 34-nation organisation’s annual report on education published overnight tues night
The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development says New Zealand directed 21.2% of its public spending to education in 2009.
That was enough to push it past the previous biggest spender, Mexico, by nearly one percentage point.
The OECD average is 13%.
Yet the opposition keeps demanding more spending, when we already dedicate the largest share of govternment expenditure in the developed world to education.
Have looked at the source data. Some interesting facts:
- Average primary teacher salary is US$41,009 vs $37,603 OECD average
- The average primary teachering hours per year have dropped from 985 in 2000 to 930 in 2010, but above OECD average of 782
- Primary student:teacher ratio has dropped from 20.6 to 16.2 – slightly above 15.7 OECD average
- Average Type A tertiary tuition fee for NZ is US$3,031
- NZ spends 57% of tertiary spend directly on institutions, well below 80% OECD average. Our 43% on allowances and loans is highest in OECD. The folly of interest free loans.
- NZ ECE spending is 1.4% of all govt expend and 0.5% of GDP – compared to OECD average of 1.1% and 0.6%.
- NZ school expenditure is 14.1% of all govt expend and 4.8% of GDP – compared to OECD average of 8.7% and 3.8%. This is top in OECD as % of govt expend and 4th top as % of GDP.
- NZ tertiary expenditure is 5.7% of all govt expend and 1.9% of GDP – compared to OECD average of 3.1% and 1.4%. This is top in OECD as % of govt expend and 5th top as % of GDP.
- NZ total education expenditure is 21.2% of all govt expend and 7.2% of GDP – compared to OECD average of 13.0% and 5.8%. This is top in OECD as % of govt expend and 5th top as % of GDP, out of 34 countries.
- NZ spending on education dropped 6.7% of GDP in 2000 to 6.0% in 2005 and in 2009 was up to 7.2%
- IN US$ PPP adjusted NZ spends $11,202 per ECE student, $6,812 per primary school student, $7,960 per secondary student and $10,619 per tertiary student. Note this is total, not govt, spending.
No one can claim we are not spending enough on education – it is the quality of the spend. I;’d rather charge inflation on student loans, and invest that into more ECE.
September 12th, 2012 at 1:14 pm
“No one can claim we are not spending enough on education”
Well, not unless they’re some kind of far left lunatic who can’t do maths. (no shortage of those)
Education needs a complete reform, and it starts by excluding anyone who has a history that contributes to the way things are.
All the staff at the Department of Education should be fired.
All negotiations with teacher unions needs to halt.
What we are looking at right now in education is a complete and systematic failure and nobody who contributed to this state of affairs should be included in any rebuild effort.
If they had any shame, they wouldn’t want to be.
(and why did Parata bring some left wing loon from the UK out here?? Even the most cursory look at the UK education system will tell you its in worse shape then the NZ one. More National Party incompetence.)
Public education was a good idea until it fell under the control of the left. Now, there is no real solution but privatisation.
Once again though, the National Party does just not have the horsepower to bring this argument to the people.
Vote:September 12th, 2012 at 1:31 pm
So being a primary school teacher in NZ is a slightly bigger job than being a primary school teacher in “OECD average land” but it is remunerated more or less accordingly. Agreed with DPF it’s hard to see what the problem is here.
And I AGREE WITH REDBAITER
the teacher unions are an absolute friggin blight and a disgrace and they need to be got rid of.
Trade unions (as a total generalisation) are yesterday’s response to yesterday’s problem. There’s never been more wealth and more opportunity available to more people for personal betterment for less personal effort than ever before, anywhere, at any time. Why would anyone want to shackle themselves to the lowest common denominator in their industry?
Vote:September 12th, 2012 at 2:00 pm
“I’d rather charge inflation on student loans”
Vote:Interest?
September 12th, 2012 at 2:01 pm
God I tried twice to raise this with Shearer on his live chat (Herald today) but it didn’t get asked. I was so looking forward to seeing what he had to say Damn it!
Vote:September 12th, 2012 at 2:01 pm
I am glad to see that the government is investing in the knowledge economy.
It’s better than investing in prisons, fighting wars and bailing out failed companies.
Vote:September 12th, 2012 at 2:41 pm
Our demographic profile may not be typical for the OECD. If we have proportionally more young people, we should expect proportionally more expenditure on education.
Vote:September 12th, 2012 at 2:55 pm
***I am glad to see that the government is investing in the knowledge economy.
It’s better than investing in prisons, fighting wars and bailing out failed companies.***
Actually, they aren’t mutually exclusive. Spending on education can only achieve so much if you’re working with poor parental environments and low IQ genes.
Curiously the US actually has quite high spending on education. And if you adjust for ethnic demographics there is a positive relationship between the spending and outcomes.
“We all know that Asian students beat Americans students, which “proves” that they must have a better education system. This inference is considered common sense among public intellectuals. Well, expect for the fact that Asian kids in the American school system actually score slightly better than Asian kids in North-East-Asia!
So maybe it’s not that there is something magical about Asian schools, and has more to do with the extraordinary focus on education in Asian culture, with their self-discipline and with their favorable home environment…
So similar to my comparison of GDP levels, let us compare Americans with European ancestry (about 65% of the U.S population, and not some sort of elite) with Europeans in Europe. We remove Asians, Mexicans, African-Americans and other countries that are best compared to their home nations. In Europe, we remove immigrants.
The results are astonishing at least to me. Rather than being at the bottom of the class, United States students are 7th best out of 28, and far better than the average of Western European nations where they largely originate from.”
http://super-economy.blogspot.co.nz/2010/12/amazing-truth-about-pisa-scores-usa.html
“Of course these graphs alone do not prove that the driving factor is education spending itself. In theory, it could be because students in rich states are different, for example in terms of family income. But the relationship still represents powerful suggestive evidence in favor of public expenditure on education.
However the left in the United States doesn’t use this argument, because they are ideologically averse to demographic adjustments having to do with race and ethnicity (most of them consider all statistical generalizations about race and ethnicity somehow offensive, regardless of why you are doing it).
The result of liberals political correctness is that they are depriving themselves of a very important argument in a very important debate.”
http://super-economy.blogspot.co.nz/2011/01/relationship-between-education-spending.html
Vote:September 12th, 2012 at 3:08 pm
They should definitely be charging interest on Student Loans and I say this as someone who would be affected!
Vote:September 12th, 2012 at 3:26 pm
***And I AGREE WITH REDBAITER the teacher unions are an absolute friggin blight and a disgrace and they need to be got rid of. ***
Sadly, the impact of teacher quality tends to be overstated. The main factors in student achievement are IQ and motivation. See Weissberg’s “Bad Students, Not Bad Schools”.
http://tinyurl.com/bt9yru6
Vote:September 12th, 2012 at 3:39 pm
“Sadly, the impact of teacher quality tends to be overstated.”
I’m not even touching on teacher “quality”. That’s an issue that is a long way down the road.
Just read any curriculum or course outline you want to. The left wing influence is overpowering and insufferable. The difficulty is that it has been like this for so long now that anyone in the industry long term has trouble recognising it.
Its education POLICY that is the major problem, and its bad because it is written by left wing bureaucrats at the behest of their loony comrades in the teacher’s unions.
The whole thing is an unworkable politically corrupt disaster and we have to stop dodging this issue.
Vote:September 12th, 2012 at 3:47 pm
RRM,
Teachers unions are not about protecting incompetent teachers and keeping everyone shackled to the worst of them. PPTA provides some of the best professional development workshops out there, given to union and non-union teachers alike, to improve overall teaching.
At union meetings about 80% of the policies discussed relate not to teacher conditions but to achieving better student outcomes. Pay rises are rarely discussed and most teachers put class sizes way ahead of pay when negotiations come up because they think big classes are hurting their students’ outcomes. The union doesn’t dedicate all its time to saving disgraced teachers, if the field officers determine the person is incompetent or guilty they don’t waste precious resources defending the indefensible, they aren’t an insurance policy for crap teachers.
As for the level of spending, it is excellent that NZ does spend so much on education. The problem is that it still isn’t enough to support the kind of 21st Century education we are now being asked to deliver. Schools are far too reliant on ‘donations’ that force the cost of so-called public education onto individual families paying for things their taxes are meant to cover. The new technology required in schools is very expensive and property costs have increased faster than funding. International student fees fund much of what schools provide and those numbers have stagnated and may soon be dropping. Some schools are now requiring students to bring their own iPads to school so they can save money on ICT. It isn’t right that tax-paying parents who are being told we have a free education system are then being handed increasingly larger bills for their kids’ schooling.
Vote:September 12th, 2012 at 3:50 pm
We saw this government back-down and raising of the white flag during the Hekia Parata fiasco, so there is little hope the Nats will ever muster the courage to have a frontal fight against the teachers’ union.
It’s the fear of electoral backlash that paralises Neville Key on any thing he attempts.
Vote:September 12th, 2012 at 3:59 pm
” It’s the fear of electoral backlash that paralises Neville Key on any thing he attempts.”
I think its just an obsession with popularity.
He wants to be popular so badly he has no time or space for real politics.
So sad really, because in their first term the Nats could have done so much. Like for example getting rid of MMP, (or at least taking a frigging stance on it.) This would have given them long term political stability and therefore the chance to fix things.
Actually, I think the overlying problem with education is that most of the Nats are as left as Labour and therefore cannot recognise the leftward tilt of the system and are therefore unable to detect the real problem. (same with the media)
If Progressives are going to continue to hold power within National we need another political choice, otherwise education and so many other problems with this country are never going to be fixed.
Vote:September 12th, 2012 at 4:03 pm
They backed down on class sizes because it turned out Parata didn’t do her sums very well and missed that her policy would damage intermediates terribly. Also the pure hypocrisy of funding private schools that advertise themselves on small class sizes while increasing public class sizes was pure folly.
And on Parata’s failed maths abilities, she also repeatedly said we’d seen a “five-fold increase in teacher numbers, but no corresponding increase in student achievement.” Well a 5-fold increase is 500%, or going from 13,000 to 65,000 teachers! What actually happened was a 1/5 increase in teacher numbers, an increase of about 20%. And over the same time period the proportion of students passing Level 2 NCEA increased about 40%, or twice the rate of teacher increase. So wrong on both accounts.
Vote:September 12th, 2012 at 4:17 pm
The big mistake was appointing Parata.
Like so many in National today, she should be in the Labour Party.
She thinks no different to your standard Progressive/ socialist idiot, and all she wanted to do was mess with peripheral issues.
The problem is far bigger than anything I have seen discussed or tried so far.
The first thing I would do (after closing down the teacher’s propaganda outlets TV One and Radio NZ), is fire every teacher and make them reapply for their jobs.
Vote:September 12th, 2012 at 5:06 pm
I wonder where the usual suspects have been with regard to New Zealand education being low cost/high quality:
mikenmild
Luc Hansen
Ah well. At least now we can acknowledge that spending equals results -assuming that those claims about relative global performance were more solid than the claims about relative NZ’s cost position.
Vote:September 12th, 2012 at 5:13 pm
Tom Hunter,
The countries that score better do spend far more money per-student than NZ. The stats here just show NZ spends much more as a proportion of govt spending and GDP than the average. All the nations scoring above us have much higher GDPs and govt spending, so while we spend a higher rate it still equals less money.
Vote:September 12th, 2012 at 5:48 pm
@ Tom Hunter,
Vote:Rightandleft has it correct. % of GDP figures would have Singapore and Hong Kong spending far more than we do, given their much higher GDP. The PISA in Focus series, #13, had a good graph which plotted the Reading Literacy scores against the actual US$ estimates of cumulative spending per student between ages 6 and 15. NZ spent around US$50,000 to get a score of 521 points; Australia spent around US$70,000 to get 515 points; and Canada spent US$80,000 to get 524 points. In summary, NZ spends much less in dollar terms to get similarly outstanding results to our Commonwealth counterparts.
September 12th, 2012 at 6:11 pm
@ Tom Hunter,
Rightandleft has it “right”. The PISA in Focus newsletters, #13, has a good graph showing Reading Literacy scores plotted against the cumulative average spend per student, over the ages of 6 to 15. NZ scores 521 points and spends less than US$50,000; Australia scores 515 points and spends around US$70,000; and Canada scores 524 points and spends US$80,000 per student.
By any reasonable measure, the NZ system is very good value for money.
Vote:September 12th, 2012 at 6:16 pm
Well the private school fees here that give many the heebie jeebies – $12-$20,000 per annum – are considered cheap compared to similar places in the UK, USA, and even Australia.
Which may mean that the first figure is not being adjusted for those extremes, or for PPP? Or possibly (as with US healthcare) the money is being poured into capital (technology?) that creates a bigger impact than labour (teachers). There are types of industry and commerce where scale matters, and more money (after adjusting for things like PPP) means a better result. But I don’t think such a direct relationship has ever been established for education, either at the micro (city) or macro (nation) level.
Or perhaps it’s just another result of NZ being a poorer country; that we’d have to boost the GDP/Govt. spending proportions even higher to “catch” the other countries. I don’t think the statistical difference in grades so obtained (whether measured by PISA or not) is sound enough to win that argument. It would be rather like us saying that we could lift our health outcomes by spending Canadian or US per person amounts.
Vote:September 12th, 2012 at 6:31 pm
@ Tom Hunter,
You make some reasonable points but I suspect that the most significant factor in assessing these sorts of “relative” stats is that we now have a much lower GDP than those around us in the PISA scores, i.e. the likes of Hong Kong, Singapore, Canada and Australia.
Also, there are some other factors that might influence our education costs, including maintaining a large number of small schools across the country. Singapore and Hong Kong, for example, must have a great advantage on that factor.
Vote:September 12th, 2012 at 6:42 pm
GDP is only the measure of how many dollar notes moved around.
Its virtually meaningless especially in socialist countries where the economy is “churned” as a result of so called re-distributive policies.
A dollar paid to a person who works at the Dept of Woman’s Affairs has far less real value than a dollar paid to a builder’s labourer.
All these stats about money spent and GDP are just smoke.
The real problem is management, and government mis-management to be more accurate.
Vote:September 12th, 2012 at 6:47 pm
“The PISA in Focus newsletters, #13, has a good graph showing Reading Literacy scores ”
The Cuban Education system enjoyed high praise among global socialists for its success until it was realised the stats coming from the Dept of Education were completely false.
PISA assesses three key areas of knowledge and skills: reading literacy, mathematical literacy and scientific literacy.
I know that in those three categories, NZ students are in the main, completely fucking hopeless.
Vote:September 12th, 2012 at 6:51 pm
Yep and how much money is spent on “sports education” of one kind or another. Sports are someones hobby and when you want to fund my hobby let me know. Until then remove sports funding from education and let the parents fund it like they should.
No reason at all for the education system to have sport as a curriculum subject.
Second, remoove the dicriminatory wages barrier to employ,menty of young people and then about 15% of them will leave school and go to work as they used to. That will solve untold issues.
Employment abd training of young people in the work place.
Less school funding required to accomodate and pay teachers to babysit working age people.
Less teachers required.
Less infrastructure required.
Less fill in years required at polytechs etc.
Less student loans and therefore less education debts.
Less busses to cart them to school.
Smaller schools.
and importantly allow income into families that;
a) need the income,
b) will stop recieving WFF
c) raise the expectations and self estem of young people,
d) allow some of us oldies to retire gracefully whilst training young people about life,
e) require the lazy Govt. to boost employment prtospects instead of lazily hiding unemployed people in education.
Can’t find a single reason not to do this.
Vote:September 12th, 2012 at 6:56 pm
Rightandleft (145) Says:
September 12th, 2012 at 3:47 pm
Some schools are now requiring students to bring their own iPads to school so they can save money on ICT. It isn’t right that tax-paying parents who are being told we have a free education system are then being handed increasingly larger bills for their kids’ schooling.
oh too bad. We all had to buy our text books from school shops at inflated prices. How is buying your own laptop (which many already own anyway), any different.
whingers and moaners.
Vote:September 12th, 2012 at 7:40 pm
Contrary to popular Neolib and Tory belief, Singapore, Shanghai and Hong Kong are not even OECD nations.
They are used by the Tory Party to make New Zealand’s PISA results seem worse than they actually are.
Vote:September 12th, 2012 at 8:21 pm
The elephant in the room is interest free student loans. Fix them, and the funding issues will solve themselves.
This issue feels a little like the debate about the age of entitlement for national super – that the only people unconvinced of the need for change are the National Party leaders, fearful that they might lose 3 or 4 votes.
When, if ever, will principle and policy integrity trump politics and self-preservation?
And please stop teacher-bashing. My experience of teachers has been overwhelmingly net positive. They are dedicated, not paid a lot, and picking up the messes of a dysfunctional society. They are mostly committed people who genuinely love kids. Give them a break!
Vote:September 12th, 2012 at 8:49 pm
orewa1 – Well said.
The elephant in the room for me is being able to claim NZ Super while still earning a full-time wage or salary. Often this happens when a person’s career and salary is peaking.
Vote:September 12th, 2012 at 9:06 pm
Our education system is one of the most successful in the world. It’s not broken. http://professionaldevelopment.school.nz/2012/01/03/new-zealand-doesnt-have-the-best-education-system-in-the-world-but-its-right-up-there/
Vote:September 12th, 2012 at 9:09 pm
Hamnida.. I understand that you believe some one turning 65 should cease work and take super or continue working and not take super.
Vote:September 12th, 2012 at 9:21 pm
Hamnida (702) Says:
September 12th, 2012 at 8:49 pm
orewa1 – Well said.
The elephant in the room for me is being able to claim NZ Super while still earning a full-time wage or salary. Often this happens when a person’s career and salary is peaking.
Which of course you pay tax upon at a higher level after having already paid for greedy little pricks like you to have free education, free student loans and medical care etc etc.
Vote:September 12th, 2012 at 10:11 pm
@ Hamnida – you mean double-dipping of the kind that Winston Peters does?
Vote:September 13th, 2012 at 1:49 am
Bob R -
“The main factors in student achievement are IQ and motivation.”
A Slate article from last week suggests that motivation is a much bigger factor than IQ – http://slate.me/QFjky4
Vote:September 13th, 2012 at 11:15 am
Redbaiter (793) Says:
September 12th, 2012 at 6:47 pm
“The PISA in Focus newsletters, #13, has a good graph showing Reading Literacy scores ”
The Cuban Education system enjoyed high praise among global socialists for its success until it was realised the stats coming from the Dept of Education were completely false.
PISA assesses three key areas of knowledge and skills: reading literacy, mathematical literacy and scientific literacy.
I know that in those three categories, NZ students are in the main, completely fucking hopeless
Redbaiter you are entertaining at times but talk absolute crap. PISA graphs put NZ near the top in each of those categories so where does the Fucking hopeless bit come from
Vote: