Education jobs in firing line

Jobs will go at the Education Ministry as it seeks to find $25 million in savings.

Education Minister Anne Tolley said the ministry would "reshape" its role, size and focus and there would be staff reductions in low priority areas.

Secretary for Education Karen Sewell said the ministry had launched an "organisational change programme". Mrs Tolley said the ministry, which has a departmental operating budget of $441 million in 2009/10, had to find $25 million by 2012/13 in savings following the line by line review leading up to last year's budget 2009, and to cover increasing cost pressures.

"As part of this process, which began in May of last year, Government has asked the ministry to focus more on frontline regional support for schools and ECE (early childhood education) services, with less national office bureaucracy.

This will mean staff can concentrate on relationships at a local level, to help schools and education providers lift student achievement." She said it would also work on being more efficient delivering core services such as property, payroll and ICT.

"The ministry will take a good, hard look at how it can deliver the best and cost efficient use of resources. It's expected that staff will be bolstered in areas of high priority, while there will be staff reductions in areas of lower priority.

"Savings will be reinvested in delivering better frontline services to ensure our education system supports every child in achieving their potential." Ms Sewell said some activities needed to be scaled down and more effort put into others.

"The new programme will focus on three critical work areas - lifting student achievement, infrastructure and services to the sector, and improving efficiency. This may have an impact on ministry staffing levels but the level and scope of this is not yet known," she said.

"Our key priorities include aligning the way we organise ourselves as a ministry to work with providers to lift performance, confirming the services we need to provide to support the sector's performance at a high standard, and identifying the savings we need to make for our resources to be used more effectively." All ministry activities and areas would be looked at.