Erica Stanford: Education minister promises a school property agency will pay for itself

The Education Minister is promising a school property agency (taking over management from the Ministry of Education) will pay for itself.

Erica Stanford says using offsite manufacturing and repeatable designs from now, is reducing class build costs.

She's announced plans for 137 new schoolrooms in Auckland.

Stanford told Ryan Bridge cost efficiencies will pay for the new property agency.

Stanford's also today announced plans to build 137 classrooms across 24 Auckland schools. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
The Ministry of Education will soon have some of its
decision making powers taken away from it. The Education Minister
eric Is Stanford announcing today that a new school Property
Agency will be stood up and it's going to take
over the government's school property portfolio. They will commission, they
will administer all that stuff. Erica Stanford with me now home, Minister.

Speaker 2 (00:18):
Good afternoon. It's been a while.

Speaker 1 (00:19):
It's been a hot minute since I last spoke to you.
We spoke to each other this morning, of course, So
why do you because you're taking this property away from
the Ministry of Education, What are you going to get
out of a new agency that they couldn't give you?

Speaker 2 (00:34):
Well, of course, you remember that we launched a school
property inquiry and a key part and a key finding
of that requiring inquiry that McCully and Bins did was
around the inflexibility of the system which was leading to
poor outcomes, poor communication, lack of accountability and not very
good value for money, and schools were getting pretty frustrated.

(00:55):
What we need is an entity that is run by
a commercially minded board who are captains of industry, who
can help deliver really good value for money and are
able to deliver property solutions in a different way to
drive better value for money. Because schools have a range
of different problems, they have a range of different abilities
on their boards, they all need different things. But the

(01:16):
Ministry has always had a one size fits all approach
and we have not had the commercial acumen. They're very
good people at the Ministry, but we want to drive
for much better results. This was a key recommendation out
of the property inquiry, and.

Speaker 1 (01:28):
You're setting up in the meantime a ministerial advisory group
to get us to this. How will the staff members
who you take on board with the new Crown agency?
Will it be less or will it be more? Will
the cost of it be less or more than what
the Ministry is currently doing it for?

Speaker 2 (01:47):
Look, that's yet to be worked through. But one thing
I can tell you is that the savings that this
will generate by driving far greater efficiencies will well outweigh
the costs of this entity, and so much so that
we are not going to be doing a budget bid
for this. We are going to be We'll just be
coming out of the savings that we create by driving
those efficiencies. We've already done a huge amount of heavy

(02:10):
lifting I was able to announce one hundred million dollars
of school property before the budget because of the savings
we've already been driving and look, sometimes we find savings
out of one or two property school properties that we
are underway that would generate enough savings for the entity
to cover the for a couple of years. So it

(02:31):
will certainly pay for itself.

Speaker 1 (02:33):
No doubt. You've won the argument on the big barnyard classrooms.
Are you going to fund schools un barnyarding.

Speaker 2 (02:42):
One of the things that we will do with the
new entity is get them to start looking at that.
What we have to do is draw a line in
the sand and say we're not doing it from here
on in. We will also work with schools with their
current budgets that they have. We also have and we
will be announcing some top up funding for those school
budgets to be able to do certain things with their property.

(03:03):
They do maintenance and health and safety, but they also
have funding in their budgets to be able to reconfigure classrooms.
We will to see what we can do to help.
We've already had a couple of projects that are going
through the pipeline where we've just said yep. Put the
walls back in so will work as flexibly as we
possibly can with schools. But this has happened for decades.
There are still open planned classrooms from the early nineteen

(03:26):
eighties that still exist. I know that because they're at
my local schools. So it is going to take some time,
but we're committed to working through that.

Speaker 1 (03:35):
All right, Minister, I appreciate your time tonight, Erica Stanford,
Education Minister. For more from Heather Duplessy Allen Drive, listen
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