A programme replacing the lights, carpet, insulation and wiring in New Zealand’s smallest schools has now finished work at 800 of them, Education Minister Erica Stanford said on Friday.
The Small Schools Upgrade Programme covers 934 state schools in total, which leaves 134 still waiting. The Ministry of Education says the last of the work will be done by the end of the 2028/29 summer.
“The work of the Small Schools Upgrade Programme | Ngā Iti Kahurangi has benefited thousands of students around the country and reduced the burden of maintenance for busy school principals and school boards,” Stanford said in a statement issued on Friday morning. Ngā iti Kahurangi is the programme’s original Māori name, which the Ministry still uses alongside the English one.
The scale of the programme is easy to miss in a press release that talks about school counts. NEWS WIRE matched the Ministry’s published list of schools in the programme against the government’s directory of educational institutions, updated on Saturday. Of the 934 schools on the list, 933 are still open, and every one of them is a state school. Between them they enrol roughly 103,400 students.
That is 934 schools out of the 2,141 state schools currently open in New Zealand, or a little over 43 percent of them. These are small places. The median roll across the programme is 99 students. Some 257 of the schools have fewer than 50 students on the roll and 112 have fewer than 25.
They are also mostly not in cities. Six hundred and fourteen of the schools sit in areas the directory classifies as rural, either rural settlements or open countryside, and another 140 are in small urban areas. Waikato has the largest share with 150 schools, ahead of Manawatū-Whanganui on 110 and Northland on 97. Canterbury has 81 and Otago 74. At the other end, the West Coast has 28 schools in the programme, Marlborough 17 and Nelson three.
The work itself is unglamorous. The Ministry says the programme funds LED lighting, acoustic panels in teaching spaces, thermal insulation in ceilings, residual current devices in power outlets, carpet tiles in primary teaching spaces, and asbestos management plans for primary schools. A project manager from one of three contracted firms audits each school for how dark, how noisy and how cold its rooms are, then the improvements are scheduled.
Across the programme so far, Stanford’s statement says contractors have installed more than 74,000 LED lights, 89,000 acoustic panels, 5,700 bales of ceiling insulation, 201,000 square metres of carpet with built-in underlay, and 57,000 residual current devices to bring power outlets up to electrical safety standards.
To be in the programme, a school needed a roll of 200 students or fewer as at December 2023, or to have already been in the earlier version of it. Schools whose rolls have since grown past 200 stay in.
The programme is not new, and it did not start with this government. It was announced in April 2020 under the previous Labour government, with $160 million for property improvements at 600 small or remote schools. It was extended to about another 150 schools in 2023, another 171 schools were added in June 2025, and in September 2025 the current government put in a further $175 million to widen it again to its present 934.
What has changed is the machinery behind it. The Ministerial Inquiry into School Property, reported in June 2024 and released that October, found the way school property was delivered was not fit for purpose. It described the Ministry’s processes as bureaucratic and inefficient, said funding decisions lacked transparency, and warned of an unsustainable gap between what was promised and what was funded, noting that only 153 of 488 school works projects were fully funded and that close to $3 billion in extra capital was needed.
The inquiry’s main recommendation was to take school property out of the Ministry altogether. That is now happening. Parliament passed the Education and Training (System Reform) Amendment Bill on 23 June 2026, and the New Zealand School Property Agency is to be established as a Crown entity no later than 1 November 2026. It will take over a portfolio of more than 2,100 schools across 8,000 hectares, valued at about $33.5 billion. Stanford named its board on 23 July, with former National minister Murray McCully as chair and chartered accountant Sarah Petersen as deputy chair.
Alongside that, the government raised the base rate for five-year property agreements by 50 percent to $45 per square metre, doubled the minimum allocation for small schools to $90,000, and fast-tracked a $413 million package covering maintenance, rural school upgrades and essential infrastructure.
“This is about creating warm, safe, dry classrooms for our children and young people to learn in and thrive,” Stanford said. “Principals are telling me these upgrades are making a significant difference to the school environment.”
Her statement quoted two principals, neither of them named and neither school identified. A principal at a Nelson-Marlborough school said the work happened faster than expected. “For a busy school this is a great result – it’s also great for me not to have any extra management roles to undertake.” A Waikato principal was “absolutely chuffed” with new carpet and said it “looks and feels amazing”.
Whether the remaining 134 schools are finished on time now falls to an agency that does not formally exist yet. The programme has taken a little over six years to reach 800 schools, and the government has given itself until the end of the 2028/29 summer to do the last 134, so the timetable has some slack in it. Rural principals have long said property is the part of the job they are least equipped for, and NZEI Te Riu Roa has a workshop on exactly that problem at its rural teaching principals conference this year.
School property is likely to keep surfacing between now and the general election on 7 November. If you want to see where the parties sit on education and other issues before you vote, our voting tool lets you compare their positions side by side.
Is your local school one of the 934, and has the work made a difference? 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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