Petition to reinstate Creatives in Schools

Wednesday, 14 May 2025

Dr Kerryn Palmer speaks to the gathered crowd outside Parliament in Wellington on Tuesday.

A petition has been presented to Parliament to reinstate the scuppered Creatives in Schools programme.

Kerryn Palmer, an arts educator on behalf of Performing Arts and Young People Aotearoa, presented the petition to the House of Representatives on Tuesday.

The petition was accepted by shadow arts minister Rachel Boyack, from Labour. Lawrence Xu-Nan, from the Greens, was also present.

Creatives in Schools was an arts programme that ran from 2019 to 2024. It funded schools and kura to partner with professional artists and creative practitioners to share specialist artistic knowledge and creative practice with students.

More than 3000 people have signed a petition to reinstate Creatives in Schools.

The programme enabled children across the country to participate in high quality, arts-rich experiences in their schools, in collaboration with professional artists.

The sitting Government scrapped the programme in its last Budget, to save between $2.8 million and $3.2m a year.

Palmer said the signatories were calling on the Government to reinstate and strengthen the programme, and roll it out in every school.

More than 3200 people had signed the petition.

Palmer said the Government was aiming to roll out its draft national arts strategy, which had a strategic pillar of nurturing talent, but had scrapped a programme in Creatives in Schools that spoke to that exact aim.

The petition was accepted by Labour’s Rachel Boyack.

“When as a society we undervalue the arts in favour of the economy and implement outdated educational methodology that focuses on individual student ‘targets’, we are at risk of building a society that focuses on wealth, status and individual success, rather than collective wellbeing, collaboration and community,” she said.

“If we further strip the arts from New Zealand education, what sort of future Aotearoa will we have?”

Previously Education Minister Erica Stanford said Creatives in Schools didn’t directly progress the Government’s education priorities.

Schools could use operational funding at their discretion based on what works best for their students, Stanford previously said, and had the choice to use that funding for creative education programmes.