An Education Budget Designed to Support Business Vultures, Not Teachers or Children

Or perhaps more politely: A budget lovingly crafted for the boardroom enlightened.

by Rebecca Thomas

This is the childhood they survived. This is who we teach.

I tried to keep the title polite.

But the 2026 Education Budget is enough to make many real classroom teachers sit quietly at their desks after school wondering how our honest descriptions of real classrooms can continuously be ignored.

Underneath the glossy headlines and million-dollar figures sits a very clear message about what this government believes education is for. And it is not children.

What sits underneath this budget is not hard to see, they don’t even try to hide it anymore.

This is not a budget written for people spending their days calming dysregulated children, searching for spare uniforms, grieving with whānau, or trying to convince exhausted teenagers that school can still offer them a future, and that future still belongs to them.

Instead, it reads like a budget shaped for meeting rooms.

Carefully engineered around systems management, measurable outputs, procurement cycles and reform delivery timelines. Engineered through those secret-handshake conversations behind closed doors, the quiet back-scratching text messages and carefully managed relationships that seem to make inconvenient OIAs disappear in a puff of smoke the moment the public starts looking too closely. Because once you strip away the glossy announcements and million-dollar headlines, what remains feels less like educational vision and more like business ventures wrapped in educational language.

Everywhere you look there are investments into structures designed to monitor, Stanfordise, assess, package, rollout, track, implement and report. There is funding for platforms, contracts, qualification redesign, assessment infrastructure, AI integration, curriculum production and externally delivered professional development. The budget itself proudly highlights millions for curriculum resources, NZQA technology upgrades, AI and machine learning pilots, professional development rollout and qualification redesign.

An entire ecosystem built on profit, not humans, now exists around education reform. The real classrooms now marooned like an island.

People (business minded people) make enormous amounts of money designing programmes for schools, measuring schools, auditing schools, training schools, digitising schools and restructuring schools.

Meanwhile, the people inside classrooms are increasingly expected to absorb all of this while simultaneously carrying the growing complexity of children’s lives. And nobody asks any of us inside of them if their ineffective profit-making scheme will actually help anyone.

The crisis inside education is not simply academic. It is human.

Teachers are not drowning because they cannot locate another assessment rubric, text book, work book, or implementation guide. They are drowning because classrooms now hold layers of trauma, neurodiversity, poverty, transience, violence, disengagement and emotional dysregulation that require human capacity to respond to properly.

They need to remember these are our COVID babies now sitting in front of us in our classrooms. 

These are the infants conceived in stressed wombs and delivered into hospitals filled with nervous adults in white coats and masks while whānau waved through windows. These are children raised through fear, uncertainty and collective stress. Children who watched adults navigate a virus we genuinely believed might kill us all. Children who saw relationships fracture, domestic violence rise, families separated, and people taken away into isolation facilities by men in white coats. These are the children who returned to classrooms socially distanced from each other while teachers sprayed surfaces with hand sanitiser and tried to make fear feel normal.

Do they think workbooks, PTSD home-learning style packs and online portals with Stanfordised assessment systems are what they need? It is not. It is human contact, relationships and understanding.

Human capacity costs money too. Just not glamorous money that fattens the fat cats and feeds the vultures circling.

The kind of funding that quietly places another trusted adult beside a child before they explode. The kind that gives a SENCO enough support to access real resources (not more forms) instead of surviving triage mode. The kind that funds counsellors, specialists, teacher aides and relationship-based interventions before children disappear entirely from the system. Support networks that wrap around them with love, fun and laughter instead of drill-and-kill routines.

Relational work has become strangely invisible in modern education reform because it cannot easily be converted into graphs, targets, dashboards or political slogans.

Relationships are slow to form for these kids. Trust is built slowly. Belonging sometimes even slower. Procurement cycles move much faster.

Meanwhile, the actual thing schools are crying out for continues to be treated like an optional extra. Humans. We  need  more teacher aides and counsellors; more relational support and specialists.

Instead, millions continue flowing away from our real children and instead toward curriculum rollouts, qualification redesigns, professional development packages, technology infrastructure, AI pilots, assessment systems and externally developed resources. Even the “secondary achievement” section of the budget is heavily centred around curriculum implementation, assessment systems and workforce training structures rather than direct relational support for young people themselves.

An entire economy now exists around “delivering reform” to schools.

Everyone appears to be getting funded except the exhausted adults trying to hold together classrooms filled with increasingly complex human need.

The deepest irony of this budget is that while it repeatedly talks about “achievement”, many of the children struggling most in our system are not lacking potential. They are lacking capacity around them. Capacity that comes from stable adults.

All the while behaviour escalates, attendance collapses, neurodiversity rises, staffing shortages continue and teacher exhaustion quietly spreads across the profession quicker than a virus itself.

This budget may pretend to invest in education. But many teachers will read it and still wonder whether anyone is truly investing in the human beings inside schools.