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Evidence · NZ Election 2026

Every question, every answer, every source

Everything the study collected, as it was collected on 5 October 2026. Read any answer in full, or download the tables behind every figure in the study.

questions
174
voters the questions were written as
32
answers collected, of 820 planned
815
answers compared like for like
800
pairs of national and town answers
124
answers with sources recorded
774
answers that showed a link
304

01

Every question, with its answers

Each question was written as a voter would ask it and went to all four assistants. Some were also asked from a town. Open a question to read every answer to it in full.

Showing 20 of 174 questions

Show all 174

02

The tables behind the study

Every figure on the study page comes from these tables. They are CSV files, which open in any spreadsheet.

  • Questions

    nz-election-2026-questions.csv

    One row per question.

    Question id, report reference, question, voter, issue, towns it was also asked from, answers per assistant

    174rows

    Download questions (CSV)

  • Answers

    nz-election-2026-answers.csv

    One row per answer, with its full text.

    Answer id, question id, assistant, town, words, parties named, showed a link, websites recorded as sources, compared like for like, full text

    815rows

    Download answers (CSV)

  • Sources by answer

    nz-election-2026-sources.csv

    One row for each website recorded as a source of an answer.

    Answer id, question id, assistant, town, website, publisher type

    4,216rows

    Download sources by answer (CSV)

  • Checks against official sources

    nz-election-2026-checks.csv

    One row per statement checked.

    Check, answer id, assistant, what the answer said, verdict, what the source says, source, date

    17rows

    Download checks against official sources (CSV)

  • Who to vote for: coding

    nz-election-2026-guidance.csv

    One row per answer to the eight questions that asked who to vote for.

    Answer id, question id, assistant, what the answer did, the words that show it

    32rows

    Download who to vote for: coding (CSV)

  • Location and national answers

    nz-election-2026-towns.csv

    One row per question asked both nationally and from a location, for each assistant.

    Question, town, assistant, both answer ids, parties named nationally and from the town, same parties

    124rows

    Download location and national answers (CSV)

Use these tables to trace findings back to the original questions and answers. The full text of each answer is also on this page, under its question.

03

Read in full and checked

Some answers were read in detail or checked against official sources. Those appear on the study page, beside the findings they support.

ChatGPT · No location

I work in a small town rather than farming. My family drives long distances for services, and local jobs and healthcare are limited. I am considering my vote in the 2026 New Zealand general election. What do parties propose about retaining schools, teachers and learning support in smaller communities?

If your main concern is whether a small-town child can keep a nearby school, have teachers available, and get learning support without travelling hours, the parties differ quite a bit in emphasis.

I’ve treated “propose” as policies and commitments available by 4 October 2026, and I’m separating concrete commitments from general promises.

At a glance

Party Small/rural schools Teacher supply & retention Learning support
National Strongest explicit investment in small/rural school infrastructure Rural placements, onsite teacher training and teacher-bonding incentives Major funding increase, including teacher aides, Learning Support Coordinators and ORS
Labour Stronger emphasis on public provision and opposing rural-service cuts; wants investment in schools Emphasises teacher certainty and professional expertise; detailed 2026 retention package less developed Supports intervention and learning support, but its 2026 package is less specific so far
Greens Strong emphasis on community-based, inclusive public education More community-led and inclusive approach; manifesto stresses education as a public good Very strong emphasis on inclusion and properly funded support, but fewer small-school-specific commitments
ACT Supports school choice/charters and has a specific rural-school-bus policy More autonomy/flexibility for schools rather than a large targeted rural-retention programme Supports learning support alongside its focus on basic literacy/numeracy
NZ First Explicit concern about rural/isolated access Supports teachers and school communities; fewer new 2026-specific teacher-retention measures Explicitly supports Learning Support Coordinators and increased ORS, plus support for dyslexia/autism etc.
Te Pāti Māori Strong focus on community/iwi-led education and Māori-medium provision Emphasis on culturally grounded local education Strong emphasis on Māori learner needs and community-led provision

National: the most concrete package for your particular problem

National has the clearest specific commitments affecting small and isolated schools.

It has already committed substantial money to school property, including $255 million for internal and external improvements at isolated, small and rural schools. Supercharging school infrastructure | National Party That is unusually directly relevant to the question of whether a small community continues to have a viable school.

On teachers, National is expanding its School Onsite Training Programme to 704 places a year from 2028, while expanding teacher-bonding places. Importantly for you, it says training can be targeted to rural and isolated communities, including online study so people can train while staying in the communities where teachers are needed. School Onsite Training Programme to provide 704 places every year from 2028 | National Party

There's also a Go Rural: Isolated Placements Fund, paying eligible trainee teachers $4,000 for a professional-experience placement in a rural or isolated school. News from Suze July 2025 | National Party

For learning support, National's 2025 package is substantial: more than 2 million additional teacher-aide hours annually from 2028, Learning Support Coordinators for all Year 1–8 schools, expanded early intervention, additional specialists and a redesigned ORS funding model intended to ensure every child who qualifies gets funded support. Budget 2025 | National Party

The catch for a small town: National's approach is primarily about making the existing system work better, rather than guaranteeing that every small community keeps its own school regardless of roll size. Its policies don't amount to a blanket “no rural school will close” guarantee.

Labour: more focused on protecting public provision and stability

Labour is arguing strongly that rural communities need reliable access to education. It has attacked National over rural school-bus reductions, arguing that long travel distances can make education substantially harder for rural families. Release: Minister of Education thinks New Zealand ends at the Bombay Hills

Its current 2026 education pitch puts particular emphasis on stability for teachers and schools. Labour's latest policy would create an Independent Council for Curriculum and Assessment, pause some curriculum changes and give teachers more certainty rather than repeatedly changing requirements when governments change. Release: Labour to give parents confidence in their children’s education

Labour also points to its previous record of funding Learning Support Coordinators and addressing teacher shortages, and says it will invest in schools and classrooms. 100 reasons to vote Labour - New Zealand Labour Party

However, compared with National, I found less detail in Labour's published 2026 material on a specific mechanism for keeping teachers in very small or isolated schools—for example, a rural-teacher allowance, bonding scheme or guaranteed staffing formula.

So if your test is “Which party has actually specified a mechanism for getting teachers into isolated schools?”, National currently has the more concrete proposal.

Greens: strongest philosophy of community-based inclusive education

The Greens' 2026 manifesto describes education as a public good and lifelong right, and explicitly says education should be inclusive and support people wherever they live. Manifesto 2026 - Green Party of Aotearoa New Zealand

That's particularly relevant to your situation because the Green approach is less about forcing small communities into a standardised model and more about education being shaped around communities and individual learners. Their education spokesperson has criticised what they see as a one-size-fits-all system and argued that education should be shaped by communities' needs. News - Services and Systems - Green Party of Aotearoa New Zealand

They also place a high priority on disability and accessibility, arguing that people and whānau should have access to the services they need, including transport. Manifesto 2026 - Green Party of Aotearoa New Zealand

The limitation is that their manifesto is less granular than National's on the specific mechanics of rural teacher recruitment and small-school viability. Their case is stronger if you value universal public provision, inclusion and community control rather than a particular rural-school staffing scheme.

ACT: choice and rural access rather than protecting every school

ACT's education policy is centred on basic skills, school autonomy, parental choice and charter schools. ACT New Zealand

There is nevertheless one directly relevant 2026 commitment: ACT has made rural school buses one of its initial election issues, specifically addressing buses passing children despite having empty seats. ACT New Zealand

ACT also supports the Government's increased investment in maths and learning support. ACT New Zealand

But ACT's model is quite different from “keep the local school because the town needs it.” It favours giving schools greater freedom and giving families alternative providers, including charter schools. ACT New Zealand

So if your priority is “don't make my child travel 50–100 km because our local school is too small,” ACT's policy doesn't give as direct a guarantee as National's rural-school infrastructure spending or NZ First's explicit concern about rural access.

NZ First: particularly relevant to isolated communities

NZ First's published education policy is unusually explicit about rural and isolated communities. It says it is concerned about loss of access to education providers in rural and isolated areas and proposes making it easier for isolated communities to participate in early childhood education. 2023 Election Policies - NZ First

For schools, it supports completing the rollout of Learning Support Coordinators to all schools, increasing ORS support, and developing better resourcing for students with dyslexia, dyspraxia, autism and other learning needs. 2023 Election Policies - NZ First

It also supports stronger connections between education and employment, which could matter in a small town where keeping young people connected to local employment opportunities is important. 2023 Election Policies - NZ First

The qualification is that much of the detailed education policy currently published by NZ First is its 2023 policy platform, rather than a fresh, fully costed 2026 education manifesto. Its 2026 campaign material confirms it is campaigning for the election, but I would therefore be cautious about treating every 2023 education commitment as a new 2026 pledge. Winston Peters - “Continuing to be the Voice of Common Sense” - New Zealand First

What this means for your particular priorities

If I reduce your question to three tests—

  1. Will my community retain a functioning local school?
  2. Will there actually be teachers willing and able to work there?
  3. Will children with additional needs get specialist help locally rather than travelling?

—I'd characterise the parties this way:

  • National: strongest concrete, funded package for rural-school infrastructure, teacher recruitment and learning support.
  • NZ First: strongest explicit rhetoric and policy recognition that rural/isolated communities need local access, with particularly clear learning-support provisions, although its current detailed education platform is older.
  • Labour: strongest emphasis on public provision, rural access and stability for schools/teachers, but its 2026 published proposals are less specific on rural staffing mechanisms.
  • Greens: strongest community/inclusion model, with education and support treated as public services that should work for everyone wherever they live; less specific on keeping individual tiny schools open.
  • ACT: strongest emphasis on choice, autonomy and alternative schools, with a specific rural-bus proposal; less emphasis on preserving every existing small school.

One important distinction: “keeping a school open” and “having adequate education locally” aren't necessarily the same policy. A party might preserve access through a small school, area school, satellite classroom, distance learning, transport, or a charter/Māori-led school. For a genuinely isolated town, I'd therefore look at the parties' school-transport, teacher-recruitment and learning-support policies together, not just whether they mention rural schools.

If you tell me roughly how small your town is (e.g. under 500, 500–2,000, or 2,000–5,000 people) and whether you're more concerned about primary, secondary, or special/additional-needs education, I can turn this into a much sharper “which parties best protect a town like mine?” comparison, including healthcare and local jobs.

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Gemini · No location

I work in a small town rather than farming. My family drives long distances for services, and local jobs and healthcare are limited. I am considering my vote in the 2026 New Zealand general election. What do parties propose about retaining schools, teachers and learning support in smaller communities?

For families living in smaller towns, keeping local schools viable, securing qualified teachers, and ensuring adequate learning support are critical issues, especially when traveling to larger centers for services is already a burden.

Ahead of the 2026 general election, political parties approach rural and provincial education through distinct policy lenses, focusing on funding models, workforce recruitment, and local community infrastructure.

Key Party Approaches to Provincial and Small-Town Education

  • National and Governing/Right-Leaning Parties:

    • Focus on Core Basics and Local Flexibility: Their educational platform heavily emphasizes foundational learning (such as structured literacy and regular assessment milestones) alongside school autonomy.
    • Property and Infrastructure: Management of school property has shifted toward specialized agencies to address maintenance backlogs. For small communities, the emphasis is generally on keeping doors open via targeted resourcing rather than forced centralization, though funding is tied tightly to standard operational formulas.
    • Targeted Support: Initiatives often target early intervention at the early childhood education (ECE) level to identify learning or developmental needs before children transition to primary school.

  • Labour and Centre-Left Parties:

    • Equitable Resourcing and Staffing: Historically, Labour emphasizes centralized network management and equity funding to ensure smaller or lower-income provincial schools do not lose out on resources.
    • Learning Support Coordinators: Previous rollouts of Learning Support Coordinators (LSCs) into clusters of schools were designed precisely to help smaller schools share specialist resources (like speech language therapists and behavioral specialists) that they could not otherwise afford on their own. Parties on the left generally campaign on expanding or protecting these centralized workforce numbers.

  • The Greens and Smaller Parties:

    • Community-Centric Resources: Parties like the Greens strongly emphasize community-owned and public infrastructure—pushing back against privatization and advocating for robust public funding that reaches remote and provincial areas equally.
    • Cross-Party Planning: Some minor parties (such as The Opportunity Party) are advocating for a 10-year, cross-party long-term plan for education to remove shifting political cycles, ensuring that rural teacher recruitment, professional development, and school funding have stable, multi-year backing regardless of which government is in power.

Common Challenges Addressed in Party Platforms

  1. The Rural Teacher Shortage: Attracting and retaining teachers in small towns remains difficult due to housing costs, isolation, and limited career pathways. Parties propose various incentives, ranging from relocation grants and student-loan forgiveness schemes for provincial service to broader improvements in base teacher pay and working conditions.
  2. Access to Learning Support: Because rural schools cannot easily hire in-house specialists (like psychologists, occupational therapists, or learning support coordinators), parties address this either by funding clustered sharing models across neighboring rural schools or through digital/telehealth delivery frameworks.

Are you looking for how a specific political party plans to support local schools in your area, or would you like to explore how these policies might affect secondary versus primary education?

Ask Gemini

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Google AI Mode · No location

I work in a small town rather than farming. My family drives long distances for services, and local jobs and healthcare are limited. I am considering my vote in the 2026 New Zealand general election. What do parties propose about retaining schools, teachers and learning support in smaller communities?

When living in a provincial or small-town community where families already travel long distances for core services, keeping local schools viable, fully staffed, and resourced with learning support is a vital issue. In the context of the New Zealand general election, political parties approach regional and rural education through distinct lenses—balancing school network security, teacher resourcing, and localized specialist access.

You can explore comprehensive, non-partisan breakdowns of each organization's platform on tools like Policy.nz. Broadly, the major political parties approach the needs of smaller-community schools, teachers, and learning support through the following policy directions:

  • National-led / Governing Parties: Focus heavily on core academic achievement, structured curriculum changes, and flexibility in staffing models. For provincial and rural schools, their emphasis is typically on maintaining operational funding stability via baseline grants and avoiding heavy-handed school closures, while targeting teacher supply initiatives (such as training incentives and allowances for hard-to-staff areas). Learning support is often channeled through existing initiatives like Learning Support Co-ordinators (LSCs) and Resource Teachers: Learning and Behaviour (RTLB), though rural advocates often debate whether allocation formulas adequately cover dispersed small schools.
  • Labour and Centre-Left Parties: Generally emphasize public education infrastructure, direct state backing for regional staffing pools, and expanding centralized or regional specialist services. Their approach to small-town and rural schools typically features protecting small school roll protections (so schools aren't penalized by fluctuating rolls), increasing or protecting operations grants to absorb regional cost-of-living/transport pressures, and scaling up centrally funded learning support roles (speech-language therapists, educational psychologists, and co-ordinators) rather than expecting small rural schools to independently source or fund itinerant specialists.
  • The Green Party: Tends to advocate for systemic equity in funding, emphasizing free and accessible public education. For rural and smaller communities, Green policies historically target the reduction of class sizes across the board, increased funding for school operations grants, and explicit improvements to regional and rural school transport networks (such as school bus routes and accessibility) to ensure children don’t face grueling travel burdens. They also advocate for embedding mental health and learning support professionals directly into regional school networks.
  • New Zealand First and Regional-Focused Parties: Frequently position themselves as protectors of provincial infrastructure, explicitly arguing against the centralization or downgrading of rural services. Their education policies often emphasize supporting provincial/low-decile staffing ratios, reviewing operational and transport funding grants to keep local rural schools open as the social glue of small townships, and backing bonding schemes or financial incentives to attract and retain teachers in provincial areas. [NZ Herald]
  • The Opportunity Party (TOP): Emphasizes strengthening regional and rural educational networks through clustering, equitable specialist deployment, relief pools, and administrative support. They advocate for ensuring that specialized investments—such as Learning Support Co-ordinators, RTLBs, speech-language therapists, and psychologists—are reliably available to every school regardless of geographic isolation.

Key Considerations for Your Vote:

  • Staffing Incentives: Look at whether parties propose specific bonding or financial relocation packages for teachers choosing to work in provincial and rural towns facing severe shortages.
  • Itinerant Learning Support: Check party commitments on how specialists (psychologists, speech therapists) are deployed to remote or small schools that cannot afford a full-time specialist on-site.
  • Transport and Roll Security: Assess policies concerning school bus route funding and "small school roll protection," which dictates whether a small drop in student numbers triggers a dangerous cycle of funding cuts and teacher losses.
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AI Overviews · No location

I work in a small town rather than farming. My family drives long distances for services, and local jobs and healthcare are limited. I am considering my vote in the 2026 New Zealand general election. What do parties propose about retaining schools, teachers and learning support in smaller communities?

AI Overview

For the 2026 New Zealand general election , political parties approach the retention of schools, teachers, and learning support in provincial and smaller communities with distinct philosophies. Given your family drives long distances and deals with limited local services, transportation rules, localized resource allocation, and curriculum stability are central themes in the current debate.

The primary approaches from the major political parties outline how they plan to support rural and small-town schools.

Party-by-Party Education Frameworks

🔵 National Party

The National Party focuses on a "back to basics" curriculum standardization, operational restructuring, and targeted teacher retention incentives.

  • Teacher Retention: Promotes the Teacher Bonding Scheme , which offers up to $40,000 over five years to encourage teachers to stay in hard-to-staff regions and subject areas. They are also shifting teacher registration and education standards directly into the Ministry of Education to streamline initial teacher training.

  • Learning Support: Pledged to scale up teacher aide hours to over 2 million by 2028. However, their structural reform focuses strictly on academic performance targets, mandating structured literacy and an hour a day of reading, writing, and maths.

  • Infrastructure: Established the New Zealand School Property Agency to manage all school building and maintenance centrally, aiming to expedite repairs for regional infrastructure.

🔴 Labour Party

The Labour Party bases its regional policy on stability, reducing operational disruption for local schools, and integrating public services.

  • School Stability: Promises a one-year freeze on the ongoing government curriculum overhaul and NCEA changes. They argue that rapid, ideological shifts disrupt small-town schools that have fewer resources to constantly retrain staff.

  • Independent Oversight: Aims to establish an Independent Council for Curriculum and Assessment (ICCA) to keep curriculum planning out of political cycles.

  • Community Resources: Historically and into 2026, Labour emphasizes integrating health and educational services (like expanded dental places or subsidized local healthcare) to lighten the travel burden for regional families.

🟡 ACT Party

The ACT Party emphasizes practical asset management, flexibility, and anti-bureaucracy measures to help regional families.

  • Rural School Buses: A core 2026 campaign pillar is the "Open Seat Rule". This eliminates the strict "nearest-school" restriction for taxpayer-funded school transport. ACT argues that parents who choose a school further away due to specific learning support or work configurations shouldn't be bypassed by half-empty buses.

  • School Choice: Continues to champion Charter Schools , offering public schools the contractual flexibility to opt out of standard Ministry regulations to better fit local community needs.

🟢 Green Party

The Green Party approaches rural education through a lens of equity, child poverty alleviation, and community-centered infrastructure.

  • Community Hubs: Proposes creating school hubs that cluster local health, welfare, and social support services directly within school grounds. This directly aims to reduce the long distances small-town families have to travel for basic services.

  • Learning Support & Staffing: Advocates for strictly improved staff-to-student ratios and better funding models for specialized learning support.

  • School Lunches: Pledges to reverse recent cost-cutting to the Ka Ora, Ka Ako school lunch program, restoring funding to $6.50 per meal and mandating the use of local small-town food providers to generate regional jobs.

Core Comparison of Key Issues

Policy Feature National Party Labour Party ACT Party Green Party
Teacher Retention $40k Bonding Scheme for regional/hard-to-staff roles. Focuses on curriculum stability to reduce teacher burnout. Reduces Wellington bureaucracy to fund local school choices. Promises improved staff-to-student ratios and better pay.
Learning Support Increases funded teacher aide hours. Delivers support via stable, expertise-led curriculum goals. Flexible school modeling via Charter framework. Creates embedded health/social service school hubs.
Travel & Access Centrally managed School Property Agency. Integrates regional health support to limit town-to-town travel. "Open Seat Rule" allowing kids on any passing school bus. Concentrates external services inside local school hubs.

If you want to look closer at a specific policy, let me know if you would like to explore how the parties plan to address broader healthcare access or how their small-business policies aim to stimulate job growth in non-farming rural sectors.

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