What we did

As an organisation we need to be more agile and responsive to our customer’s needs. In 2010/11, we have focused on delivering our services to the education sector more innovatively, effectively and efficiently.

We are advancing an overarching change programme to improve our effectiveness as an organisation. The programme is focusing on three key areas:

• changing the way we work, to take a strong leadership role in driving better education outcomes and intervening earlier and more definitively where performance is poor
• realising efficiencies in service delivery
• managing our work within existing resource levels.

We are changing how we work with schools to help them accelerate student achievement.  Key changes are:

• establishing the Student Achievement Function, where we will work closely with school leaders to jointly understand the learning needs of students and lift achievement
• redesigning how and why we provide professional learning and development resources for teachers and school leaders
• reviewing our internal Curriculum, Teaching and Learning function to ensure it can deliver high-quality teaching resources across English and Maori-medium sectors.

We are developing an organisational model that shifts our emphasis from administering the education system, to a greater focus on performance. This model will provide us with the shape and structure to be a smaller and more agile organisation, responsive to the needs of our customers and more effective in our impact on system performance.

We have reduced our vacancy levels across the organisation, and established a new process to tightly manage staff numbers and reprioritise resources. We have continued to find savings, and to undertake a series of business improvement reviews to find more efficient ways of delivering services and streamlining our resourcing. This has included across our research and analytical function, policy function, financial management, facilities management, and corporate and administrative services.

In 2010/11, the Ministry was reviewed as part of the Government’s Performance Improvement Framework process. The review commented on a range of aspects of the Ministry’s performance and acknowledged many positive areas as well as identifying areas for improvement. Our organisational change programme is addressing these areas.