Nick Smith National Education Spokesperson

23 May 2002

Real school budgets go backwards

Education Minister, Trevor Mallard, has again diddled schools of funding by not properly compensating their operations grants for inflation, for the third year running, says National's Education spokesperson, Nick Smith.

"Labour promised to inflation-proof the operations grants for schools, but has shortchanged them of $21 million in funding. This year's increase of 2.2% is again less than the official inflation rate of 2.6%.

"This follows last year's increase of 1.6% when the official inflation rate was 3.1%.

"The average school is receiving $8000 less in real terms in operations funding than three years ago. This means schools are having to cut real programmes for children from their schools.

"Shortchanging schools at a time of record budget surpluses is false economy. There will be no knowledge economy when schools are facing real cuts in funding," says Dr Smith.

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