Kia ora,
Welcome back to Collective Matters.
As we move to June we move from Budget Month to Budget Aftermath Month.
In May, we asked educators to help us tell the story of what is actually happening in schools, kura, early learning services and classrooms across Aotearoa.
The responses to our Budget 2026 survey were clear, grounded and pretty sobering. Educators told us they are tired of political churn, tired of announcements that do not match classroom reality and tired of being asked to implement more, absorb more and somehow make the system work with less.
That survey became our report, Investing in Educational Futures: Budget advice from educators.
We also released Still Beyond Capacity: Learning Support in Aotearoa After the 2025 Budget.
This report followed up on last year’s learning support work and asked a very simple question: after the government’s 2025 learning support announcement, what has changed? For too many schools and too many young people, the answer was - not enough.
The report does not dismiss the possibility that some funding commitments may still make a difference in 2027 or 2028. But it is very clear about what the sector is experiencing now. Schools are still topping up learning support from operational funding. Teacher aide funding remains inadequate. And whānau, kaiako, tumuaki and ākonga are still carrying the consequences of a system that announces support faster than it delivers it.
As we said in the report: the system is still beyond capacity. The children it exists to serve cannot wait another year for that to change.
Phase 5 curriculum consultation
June also brings another round of curriculum consultation deadlines. The Phase 5 subject consultation closes on 15 June, and we know that many teachers are trying to make sense of large documents, tight timelines and the very real question of whether feedback is being genuinely heard.
Thanks again to Claire Coleman who has continued to lead a huge amount of work in this space through the Afterschool Special series, including sessions on English, Maths and Science. These are there to help people understand what is being proposed, what the implications might be and how to make a submission before the deadline.
If you have not yet engaged with the Phase 5 materials, please do. If you are exhausted by consultation, do what you can as it is one of those moments where silence will be read as consent.
Event: A Cautionary Tale on Curriculum Reform
This last Thursday, we hosted A Cautionary Tale on Curriculum Reform with Professor Dominic Wyse.
The discussion looked at the way one theory and one version of the so-called science of reading has come to dominate recent literacy policy debates, and why cherry-picking evidence is risky when it becomes the basis for national policy.
At a time when curriculum reform in Aotearoa is moving at speed, this is an important conversation. Not because educators are anti-evidence. Quite the opposite. Because educators know evidence needs to be broad, current, contextual and used with professional judgement.
You can check out the recording here.
Shifting our focus from UpliftED to regional roadshows
As we shared last month, we have made the difficult decision to suspend UpliftED 2026.
The conference was originally designed to sit within the term break to make attendance as accessible as possible for teachers. However, in the current climate, we have heard consistently from principals and school leaders that uncertainty, workload and travel costs are making it hard to commit staff to professional learning.
Rather than push ahead and hope for the best, we have decided to shift our focus.
We are now working towards a series of regional pre-election roadshows later in the year. The aim is to keep amplifying the messages educators are carrying, to connect people across regions and to help make education a serious election issue.
More details will follow soon.
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Substack Summary
Here is the list of the published posts from May 2026 on the Aotearoa Educators Collective (AEC) Substack:
31 May 2026: School Briefs: A Bland Budget and the Small, Tight Network Shaping Curriculum — Link
30 May 2026: Sunday Read: School Shorts, Stanford’s Office, and the Necessity of Parent Persuasion — Link
29 May 2026: School Briefs - Unpacking Budget 2026 — Link
27 May 2026: Afterschool Special: Phase 5 Science Subjects Live with Claire Coleman and Lian Soh — Link
26 May 2026: Launch of Still Beyond Capacity — Link
25 May 2026: Still Beyond Capacity: One Year On — Link
25 May 2026: School Briefs - Pre-budget special with BERL’s Killian Destremau — Link
25 May 2026: Investing in educational futures - Budget advice from educators — Link
24 May 2026: School Briefs - Silencing the profession, and educators on the budget — Link
23 May 2026: SUNDAY READ: This is the education reform moment we cannot afford to sleepwalk through — [Link](https://www.google.com/search?q=https://aecnz.substack.com/p/sunday-read-this is-the-education)
23 May 2026: The Silent Subsidy: A Human Cost of Schooling — Link
22 May 2026: Teaching is a Profession, Not a Portfolio — Link
20 May 2026: Waitangi Tribunal Series - Ripeka Lessels — Link
19 May 2026: Irony — Link
19 May 2026: We Are Managing Scarcity. Someone Tell the Emperor He Has No Clothes — Link
18 May 2026: Event - A Cautionary Tale on Curriculum Reform — Link
18 May 2026: Waitangi Tribunal Series - Bruce Jepsen and Dr Therese Ford — Link
17 May 2026: Back to the future with our national qualification; a disaster in the making — Link
17 May 2026: School Briefs - Curriculum delay, ditching NCEA, Learning Support budget — Link
16 May 2026: New senior secondary qualifications – NZCE (Year 12) and NZACE (Year 13) Buyer beware — Link
16 May 2026: Sunday Watch: Guy Claxton - Bodies of Learning — Link
01 May 2026: Three curriculum concerns and a strategy — Link