Priority Outcome 6:

What are we seeking to achieve?

The Ministry leads the education sector, administering funds, advising on regulations and legislation, providing services to support learning, developing policy to support the Government’s commitments and gathering evidence. To lead the sector effectively, the Ministry needs to focus on excellence and results, and particularly to use evidence and information to respond quickly where equality of opportunity in education is at risk.

Vote Education funds a number of high-cost services, for example, paying teacher salaries, managing school transport and building new school property. Most of these services and expenses are necessary for the maintenance of the education system. We need to be assured that these services represent ongoing value in terms of: the price paid; the quality and impact of services provided; the role of the Ministry in funding the services; and the priority given to these services over other uses for the funding.

We need to ensure that the system works for every student, providing them with the knowledge, skills and training they require, in the best ways and in the shortest time. We need to use the resources and expertise within the Ministry to identify why particular groups of students are not well served by the system, and ensure education providers afford every student the opportunity to achieve their potential. This means ensuring that we have strong relationships with education providers and that policy and programme development is informed by evidence about what works best and how to implement change effectively.

back to top

How will we demonstrate success in achieving this?

We will know we have achieved this when we see changes such as:

• the Ministry’s efforts concentrated on effective targeting of interventions and levers in order to bring about system change
• ongoing efficiencies in Ministry expenditure and greater assurance of cost benefits on significant expenditure
• effective use of evidence in policy development
• a better integration of policy advice, operational policy and implementation
• Ministers and central agencies expressing confidence in the Ministry’s advice.

back to top

What will we do to achieve this?

Improving value for money:

The Ministry will continue to review the key areas of expenditure in the education system to provide high quality advice to Government on how to improve the value from education expenditure. This will include work in the tertiary sector to look at options for maximising returns from funding and simplifying the systems in place to distribute and monitor that funding. We will also continue to develop internal systems to identify and use better measures of cost and cost-effectiveness in policy development and advice.

Ministry performance will be measured by:

• the quality of our advice to Government on how to simultaneously improve value for money in education and advance its priorities.

back to top

Increasing internal efficiencies:

We will continue to review Ministry expenditure and systems to identify and implement savings in corporate spending and to focus policy development and resources on Government priorities. This will include implementing the decisions made through the Budget process and line-by-line review, and reducing expenditure and effort on non-priority areas. As part of this work, we will continue to develop particular areas of Ministry capability (the section on Organisational Health and Capability provides further information on this).

Ministry performance will be measured by:

• improvement in the performance of Ministry functions, within reduced baselines
• ongoing efficiency of Ministry expenditure, ensuring that productivity and quality improve, while implementing savings.

back to top

Improving responsiveness:

The Ministry will focus on improving its services, delivery models and responsiveness to underperformance. We will refine our criteria for identifying poorly performing education providers and determine how best to intervene to ensure that educational achievement of students is not at risk. This will include considering opportunities to devolve funding and decision-making to front-line staff – either in our regional or district offices – or to clusters of schools or boards of trustees.

The Ministry is reviewing its regional presence to determine how to work best with education providers to improve education performance, and to ensure that the professional capability of staff in regional and district offices is of a high standard and well supported by policy and corporate processes. The Ministry has developed specialist service standards for special education services to ensure our own staff and other providers are delivering a consistent and high standard of specialist services to children. Monitoring against those standards will begin in the 2009/10 year.

Ministry performance will be measured by:

• the speed at which we identify instances of low educational achievement and poor management
• the quality of our advice to Government on where interventions are required and how best to achieve improvements
• having an agreed basis for intervention, and acting quickly and effectively as appropriate
• the proportion of interventions where only one intervention is required to resolve issues.

back to top

Reducing compliance costs:

Unnecessary compliance costs can distract education providers from their focus on educational achievement, either by taking them away from teaching or by delaying or restricting approaches to resolving issues. We need to agree where accountabilities and corresponding compliance requirements sit across the system, and determine where compliance costs can be minimised and streamlined so that principals and teachers can focus their attention on providing students with the skills they need. We will evaluate the success of discrete programmes, their alignment with Government priorities, and explore options for giving greater discretion to schools on the use of resources.

Ministry performance will be measured by:

• schools reporting less of a compliance burden
• schools having more flexibility in the way they direct funding to their priorities
• a reduction in costs of administering discrete funds for the Ministry of Education.