Results of the 2024 school audits

The latest audits of New Zealand's public schools show that many school boards struggle with sensitive expenditure decisions.

Overall, 95% of schools received standard unmodified audit opinions in 2024 – that is, their financial statements fairly reflected their transactions for the year and their financial position at the end of the year.

More concerns than normal about schools' sensitive expenditure were brought to auditors' attention. These included concerns about spending on travel without a clear business purpose, most of which were related to how principals used the professional coaching and wellbeing funding. In most cases, even though these payments were approved by the school board, the schools were not following their own policies.

Schools, like all public organisations, are spending public money. This spending must be appropriate and be able to withstand scrutiny.

The report includes guidance for school boards on sensitive expenditure and other matters raised through our audits: fraud or suspected fraud, cyclical maintenance, conflicts of interest, and budgeting. We also recommend the Ministry of Education gives schools further support in some of these areas.

The Ministry has now started its project on the future of schools' financial reporting. We are supporting the project in an advisory capacity. We are also planning work to consider whether using a new standard for auditing less complex entities would reduce time and cost for school audits.

We've also updated our data on all school non-standard audit opinions from 2018 to 2024 by region, year, and issue type. You can explore this data using the interactive tool on our website.