Education Minister Erica Stanford has announced an extra $58 million for school infrastructure projects, saying the top-up would enable projects to get underway quicker and help boost the construction sector.<\/p>\n
The $58 million in extra funding was part of a $413 million package:<\/p>\n
$58 million for operating maintenance work for all schools$255 million for internal and external improvements on all isolated, small and rural schools, representing half of all state schools$100 million over five years for urgent and essential infrastructure work<\/p>\n
The $58 million would be a one-off top up to the current property maintenance grant which would support schools’ operating maintenance works, such as painting, exterior washdowns, roof and cladding repairs, and other minor fixes.<\/p>\n
Schools would be eligible for either $5000 or 50% of their 2025 Property Maintenance Grant funding, whichever was greater. For 203 small schools, the $5000 top-up represented more than half their annual grant.<\/p>\n
The Ng\u0101 Iti Kahurangi (NIK) programme would expand to cover more schools and a wider range of works, including flooring, heating, window repairs, and roofing. The Government said the investment will help prevent bigger infrastructure problems in the future.<\/p>\n
Stanford said the Ministry of Education had halved the cost of building a new classroom, from $1.2 million to $620,000, by focusing on offsite manufacturing and cost efficiencies.<\/p>\n
The $413 million package included $58 million in new funding, $100 million from Budget 2024, $80 million from the Ministry of Education baseline, and $175 million in brought-forward funding.<\/p>\n
Stanford said the Government had a “significant pipeline” of maintenance work to keep schools in great shape.<\/p>\n
“We’re accelerating $413 million of projects so they can get underway sooner. This will enable schools to do significant maintenance over the coming summer holidays, and support more rural and isolated schools to upgrade their infrastructure.”<\/p>\n
She said work would start on an extra 45 school-led projects waiting in the pipeline would be approved by the end of this year.<\/p>\n
“This work was always going to be needed to ensure that existing infrastructure doesn\u2019t end up with bigger problems down the track. We\u2019re bringing it forward to support our schools, and our tradespeople now.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Education Minister Erica Stanford has announced an extra $58 million for school infrastructure projects, saying the top-up would…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":36268,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[84,42,43,135,40,38,41,39],"class_list":{"0":"post-36267","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-education","9":"tag-headlines","10":"tag-news","11":"tag-politics","12":"tag-top-news","13":"tag-top-stories","14":"tag-topnews","15":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36267","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36267"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36267\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/36268"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36267"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36267"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36267"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}