Fuel surge triggers school camp rethink, food budget rise
Thursday, 16 April 2026
A school is considering moving its annual camp to the school grounds as the fuel crisis bites, with its principal in a race to offset costs amid a tightening budget.
Glenbrook School principal Lysandra Stuart says the school has had to increase its spending on food as more children are arriving hungry.
Stuart, who is the head of the Principals’ Federation, spent the recent school holidays combing through the budget for savings.
Additional costs - including fuel surcharges from security and delivery services, and increased spending on food as parents struggled - were putting pressure on schools, she said.
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“With the cost of living and the fuel impacts on top, how are we supposed to keep the day-to-day business of schools going?”
She said it was a growing issue that would materialise once schools were back for Term 2, with tight budgets with “very little variability”.
She will likely move her school camp on-site and cut education outside the classroom (EOTC) as a result.
“You’ve got to feed your kids, right? So you’re asking where else do you cut? You’re just trying to figure it out at all times because you're trying to look after your kids.”
With schools now applying for next year’s budget, she is calling on the Government to increase funding to meet rising costs.
Moving the camp to school grounds wasn’t just for the school’s benefit, but for parents too, with Stuart expecting fewer will be able to afford transport or take time off work to volunteer.
She said she was seeing more parents struggling, with heating and food being cut from two-income households in the weeks leading up to the school holidays.
As her school in Franklin was not part of the school lunch programme, she spent her weekends grocery shopping and stocking the freezers with food for her students.
She only expected it to get worse with winter.
The ministry met with the Principals’ Federation regularly, but she said it was not clear what support it would provide if the crisis worsened.
“It's the nuts and bolts and the realities that are still very unclear.”
With the Government firm on keeping kids in the classroom, she said schools needed a framework for how to respond when students simply could not get to school.
“If we're going to focus on maintaining continuity of learning under constrained conditions, what does it actually mean for a school? … How do you get that teaching done?”
Principals in her area had taken it upon themselves to drive children to school, but many schools did not have that option.
She was especially concerned for smaller schools, where principals taught most classes and were facing additional workloads managing both the impacts of the fuel crisis and a changing curriculum.
They also did not have the ability to raise money through fund raising in the same way larger schools did.
Stuart said schools needed to be putting their own plans in place to ensure they could continue to run smoothly if the situation changed.
Stuart said the Ministry of Education had told principals schools were expected to operate as normal and manage costs within the existing budgets under phase one.
Phase two would see closer coordination between schools and the ministry, sharing data so the ministry could develop localised response plans.
With prioritisation of fuel happening in phase three, she said the ministry would be communicating system-wide expectations around continuity under severe constraints in time.
“We just need those clear guidelines, expectation, communication coming up. So people can make plans, and they can pivot if they have to, based on what's happening in their own school and community.”
Education Minister Erica Stanford said every school was facing its own challenges as a result of the fuel situation.
She has asked the Ministry of Education to contact every school in the country so there was a clear, up-to-date picture of what they’re dealing with.
Encouragingly, she said the majority of schools had already begun or completed planning to manage fuel impacts or improve efficiency.
'Our priority is to keep schools open and keep children in classrooms. The Ministry is working across the system to plan for all phases of the Government’s fuel response and will stay closely connected with schools nationwide.
“I’ll have more to say shortly about support to help manage these broader fuel challenges facing the education sector.'