Solar panels are no small outlay; the Minister owes the country reasons for where they will first go up
The Government has named the first schools to receive solar panels under a thirty million dollar programme set out in this year's Budget. Forty schools in the North Island, one hundred and fifty seven in the South Island and three in the Chathams make up this first tranche. The announcement gives a headline figure of five hundred schools in total, though the numbers supplied for this initial group add to two hundred; the record is silent on how the remaining schools will be chosen or when.
The case for the programme is not a weak one. Solar panels cut running costs over time, and for schools in places prone to outages, not least the Chathams, they offer a measure of resilience that has value beyond the power bill. Money saved on electricity is money that need not be found from elsewhere in a school's operational grant, and that is worth having. This newspaper does not dismiss it.
But the distribution asks a question the announcement does not answer. One hundred and fifty seven schools in the South Island against forty in the North Island is a heavy skew, and the North Island holds the greater share of the country's rolls, including the greater share of Maori and Pacific learners whose outcomes this Minister has rightly made a priority elsewhere in the portfolio. Nothing in the record explains why the balance falls as it does, whether by roof suitability, sunlight hours, or some other criterion never stated. Absent that explanation, the announcement invites the suspicion of an accident rather than a plan, and a Minister who has been exacting about evidence in structured literacy and attendance ought to hold capital works to the same standard.
The further question is one of proportion. Thirty million dollars is not a large sum against the scale of the schooling estate, but it is not a trivial one either, and every dollar spent on panels is a dollar not spent on the property backlog, on classrooms, or on the teacher supply pressures that bear more directly on whether a child learns to read. A solar roof does not improve a child's attendance nor teach a child to add. The Minister has been clear elsewhere that the core task is literacy, numeracy and getting children into class; this programme should be judged, and defended, against that yardstick, not against its own modest merits alone.
- Publish the criteria used to select the first tranche of schools, including why the South Island share is so much larger than the North Island's.
- Set out how the remaining schools toward five hundred will be chosen, and on what timetable.
- State plainly how this programme's cost has been weighed against the property backlog and against spending that bears more directly on attendance and literacy.