Education Pou

At Rātā, we believe everyone deserves a good start to education so they can find a positive pathway in life.

We work to improve educational outcomes for learners across our takiwā by focusing on areas of greatest need. For the next five years, our approach will centre on:

Empowering rangatahi Māori to thrive through transitions in education.
Developing culturally responsive support for unmet learning needs.

We see education as a powerful mechanism for creating a more equitable and sustainable society. While there are many pressures across the education sector, our role as grant-make and financial investor allows us to take a targeted approach, focusing on areas of inequity where we can make the greatest difference.

Data and evidence underpin our decision making

Evidence sits at the heart of our community investment decisions. It guides how we identify need, where we focus our support, how we measure impact, and how successful outcomes can be shared.

Research undertake through our partnership with Tokona te Raki, which explored equity in education, found that tamariki transitioning between English-medium and Māori-medium education experienced the least positive educational outcomes. To further our understanding, we also partnered with Tātai Aho Rau | Core Education to examine available data and evidence and identify how Rātā could most effectively address these inequities for children needing learning support.

This work has shaped our five-year goal: to support organisations, programmes and initiatives that align with our approach to enable rangatahi to thrive through educational transitions. It also builds on our existing Early Years transition-to-school programme, outlined below.

Early Years

Over the last five years, we have been working to ensure children get the best start to their education by:

Supporting children to experience a successful transition from early childhood learning to school through enhancing the practice of teaching staff working with children (aged three to six).
Helping to increase the effectiveness of organisations working with young children better to support families/whānau in the first 1000 days.

We have also supported several Equity in Education Projects, such as Uru Mānuka, Digital Future Aotearoa, and Tokona te Raki.