Parliament has passed one of the biggest overhauls of New Zealand’s education system in years, with the Education and Training (System Reform) Amendment Bill clearing its third reading on Tuesday. The law hands charter schools much longer contracts, creates a new agency to run school property, shifts regulatory work onto the Education Review Office and rebuilds the Teaching Council under tighter ministerial control. The opposition and the main teaching unions fought the bill to the end, calling the final changes a power grab pushed through without consultation.
Education Minister Erica Stanford framed the package as a tidy-up of a system she says has grown tangled and unaccountable. She said the reforms would “clarify roles and responsibilities across the sector, improve oversight and accountability, and ensure schools, teachers, and learners are better supported”. The government argues that splitting up the Ministry of Education’s many jobs will let each agency focus and stop the ministry from marking its own homework.
For charter schools, the bill is a clear win. A single proven sponsor can now hold one contract covering several campuses rather than applying afresh each time, and charter contracts can run for up to 20 years to give operators more certainty. Associate Education Minister David Seymour, the long-time champion of the model, said the change would let good schools grow faster. “Now that a single proven sponsor can hold a contract for multiple charter schools, more Kiwi students will have that opportunity,” he said. “It means a school that’s unlocking potential for kids in one community can do the same in another, without having to go through a whole new application process.”
The structural changes are just as large. A new New Zealand School Property Agency will be set up as a Crown entity to plan, build, maintain and administer the school property portfolio, with a deadline of no later than 1 November 2026. School buildings have been a running sore for the government, with cost blowouts and delays drawing repeated criticism, and ministers hope a dedicated agency will get more classrooms built for the money.
By the same date the Education Review Office is due to take over regulatory functions for early childhood education, school hostels and private schools, work currently sitting inside the ministry. The idea is to separate the body that reviews and regulates from the body that sets policy and funds the system. The bill now goes for Royal Assent, after which the agencies begin the long job of standing up the new arrangements.
The fight in the House was over a different part of the bill. A late amendment reshaped the Teaching Council, cutting it to between seven and nine members all appointed by the minister and moving responsibility for professional standards to the Secretary for Education. Opposition parties said that turned an independent professional body into an arm of the minister’s office, and they were furious about how it was done.
Green Party education spokesperson Lawrence Xu-nan said the amendment “completely ripped away any remaining ounce of independence” from the council. “Professional councils must remain independent and must not be politicised by any government,” he said. He attacked the process as much as the substance, calling it “fast and loose lawmaking” and “undemocratic” because the amendment paper landed the night before the debate, leaving no room for consultation. His worry was that teachers would end up working within “this narrow scope of what any minister would consider to be best practice” rather than drawing on independent evidence.
Labour’s education spokesperson Ginny Andersen used similar language, describing the move as a “last minute power grab” that was “completely undermining” the council’s independence. She warned that the minister would now be able to “directly instruct what was taught in the curriculum” and said the call should not sit with one politician. “Experts are best to determine what our children learn, not Erica Stanford,” she said.
The primary teachers union NZEI Te Riu Roa was equally blunt. President Ripeka Lessels said the changes would place the council under “total ministerial control” and “dismantle the independence of the teaching profession’s regulatory body”, and were “introduced with no prior consultation with the education sector”. The Council of Trade Unions also opposed the bill, arguing it gives the Minister of Education the power to make changes to the curriculum and how it is taught without the usual checks.
Supporters counter that ministers are already accountable for the system through Parliament and the ballot box, and that a smaller, focused council is no bad thing. They point out that the bulk of the bill is plumbing, with property, regulation and contracting tidied into clearer lanes, and that the heat over the Teaching Council should not drown out reforms most schools will barely notice day to day.
What is not in dispute is the timing. With the general election set for 7 November 2026, education has become a front-line battleground, and this bill draws the lines sharply. National and ACT are running on choice, contestability and accountability. Labour and the Greens are running on professional independence and local control. Voters will get the final say in November, and the new agencies will be only weeks old when they do.
If you want to see where you sit on questions like this before the election, you can work through the issues with our voting tool and compare your views against the parties.
What do you make of the charter school changes and the shake-up of the Teaching Council? Tell us in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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