Ahead of Budget 2025, education union NZEI Te Riu Roa launched a "teacher aide in every classroom" campaign, calling for about $2.5 billion over five years for children with disabilities, including roughly $1 billion for teacher aides and about 11,111 extra aides. NZEI governing council member and speech-language therapist Conor Fraser said learning support was the number one issue for everyone working in education, and noted that about 54% of teacher aides were on insecure fixed-term contracts.

On 22 May 2025 Education Minister Erica Stanford announced what she called the largest boost to learning support in a generation, including funding to build to more than two million additional teacher aide hours a year from 2028. The package was framed as cutting long waits for support and giving teachers more time to teach, and sat within a wider $2.5 billion Vote Education spend over the forecast period.

Ministry of Education Budget documents set out that the learning support boost is part-funded by reinvesting about $613.5 million of operating funding over four years from programmes being wound down. These include the Kāhui Ako scheme ($375.5m), Resource Teachers: Literacy ($39.2m) and 53 Resource Teacher: Māori roles ($36.1m), plus Reading Together, Study Support Centres and several Pacific education programmes. The Ministry says the money is redirected into in-school supports, teacher aide hours, Learning Support Coordinators and early intervention.

NZEI Te Riu Roa welcomed extra teacher aide hours in the Early Intervention Service but said the wider package came at the expense of women and expert teachers. President Ripeka Lessels argued the Budget was part-funded by barriers to pay equity and by cutting specialist roles, and that the below-inflation 1.5% rise in school operations grants left teacher aides' work security more precarious. She also said scrapping Resource Teacher: Māori roles breached the Government's Te Tiriti obligations.

The New Zealand Principals' Federation described the learning support funding as a breakthrough. RNZ reported principals welcoming the extra teacher aide hours and the new Learning Support Coordinator role: Avonside Girls' High School principal Catherine Law praised the investment in coordinators and more aide hours, while Oropi School principal Andrew King said it would give schools the time to access services children need. Burnside High School principal Scott Haines welcomed the Ongoing Resourcing Scheme boost but was disappointed coordinators were rolled out to primary and intermediate schools first, not secondary.

The Kāhui Ako scheme was formally disestablished from 28 January 2026, ending extra pay for more than 4,000 teachers across 220 communities of learning, with affected staff returning to their previous school roles and 12 months' salary protection. RNZ reported some principals felt gutted at the loss without consultation, while the new teacher aide hours phase in gradually, starting at about 225,000 extra hours in 2026 and building toward the full annual total by 2028.

Online reaction is split: parents and teacher aides broadly welcome more classroom support and shorter waitlists, while teachers, union members and Māori-medium educators are angry that aide hours are part-funded by scrapping Kāhui Ako and resource-teacher roles, and question how much of the funding reaches insecure aide jobs.

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