National Library school services face 36% cut risk under 47-role plan

Proposed staffing cuts at New Zealand’s National Library and Archives New Zealand risk reducing services to schools by about 36 percent, the School Library Association of New Zealand Aotearoa says.

The Public Service Association told members a restructure proposal would remove 47 full-time-equivalent roles, or 12 percent of the combined workforce. The cuts are understood to take effect by 30 November 2026 if confirmed.

Core school-support staffing stood at 51 people, or 44.5 full-time roles, when the association was briefed. School Library Association president Trena Lile said the literacy and learning capability team faced a matching 36 percent reduction and a shift from in-person school-library support toward online delivery.

In 2024/25 the National Library helped 815 schools, down from 966 the year before. It still supplied 383,835 physical items, slightly higher than the prior year. Online school-service visits roughly halved to 266,212.

Budget 2025 already locked in a Baseline Savings Programme for the National Library and Archives. Initiative 16710 returns about $2 million a year in operating funding from 2024/25 through the outyears via workforce rationalisation, property changes, discretionary cuts and service reviews.

Treasury advice on that initiative warned that exact savings sources were not fully confirmed. It said impacts could include public-facing services and workforce capability. The Department of Internal Affairs planned to protect statutory and regulatory obligations through reprioritisation, yet successive change rounds raised significant risks to core delivery.

A March 2025 “new way of working” restructure had already cut a net 30 full-time positions at the two institutions, half of them vacant at the time. The PSA estimated that if the latest plan proceeds the combined workforce would sit about 15 percent smaller than two years earlier, at roughly 350 staff.

Finance Minister Nicola Willis set an in-principle path in May 2025 toward about 55,000 core public servants by mid-2029, down from roughly 63,600. That implies around 8,700 fewer full-time roles and claimed savings of about $2.4 billion over the forecast period.

National Library Services to Schools has supported New Zealand schools since 1942. It supplies curriculum-aligned and reading-for-pleasure loans, professional development, advice for school librarians, and digital tools including Topic Explorer and AnyQuestions. Loan entitlements scale with school roll.

NZCER research published in 2025 for SLANZA and the National Library confirmed school libraries are not mandatory. Investment in spaces, collections and paid specialist staff is discretionary and highly variable. Small, rural and higher-barrier schools were less likely to hold strong collections, dedicated paid library hours or qualified staff.

The National Library’s 2023 school-library survey found Services to Schools was the most-used external resource: 49 percent of responding schools used it every term and 48 percent used it one to three times a year.

Lile said staff contact schools without dedicated librarians to keep books flowing. Those schools risk falling off the radar if outreach capacity shrinks. New Zealand’s school roll stood near 856,000 across roughly 2,500 schools.

PSA national secretary Fleur Fitzsimons opposed the plan. "This proposal would decimate National Library and Archives, and we oppose it," she said. The union listed further proposed impacts including a 16 percent cut to preservation and conservation, 19 percent to digital preservation, 22 percent to collection-description roles, an 18 percent reduction in research librarian capacity, and the axing of the music access service.

Department of Internal Affairs leadership stressed consultation remains open. National Librarian Rachel Esson said the review of support for schools was incomplete.

The review of support for schools is not yet complete and, as such, no decisions have been made.

Esson restated commitment to reading cultures, the refreshed curriculum and increased digital services.

I am committed to helping schools build strong reading cultures and library services, supporting the government’s refreshed curriculum, and offering increased digital services to meet the changing needs of our students, their teachers and school libraries.

Chief Archivist Anahera Morehu and Esson jointly framed the change as value-for-money work still inside consultation.

Supporting and engaging with our people is a priority. We are focused on delivering better public value for money and delivering customer needs in new and more sustainable ways. The proposal is part of our internal process and no final decisions have been made.

The Department of Internal Affairs has acknowledged to staff that the cuts will likely affect service levels.

The $2 million annual baseline saving is modest against total Crown spending yet sits inside successive Vote Internal Affairs reductions and whole-of-government headcount targets. Statutory duties under the Public Records Act, legal deposit and national collection stewardship cannot be easily outsourced.

Boards of trustees, especially in small and rural communities, already decide library investment without a legislative floor. Further contraction of central lending and professional support would raise the effective cost of reading resources where local capacity is thinnest.

Officials must now show that any shift to digital delivery can sustain physical loan volumes near 384,000 items a year and keep isolated schools connected. Consultation continues; final decisions will set the service envelope for the next school year and beyond.