Why Schooled Election Pilot?

We are independent of your school…

This removes the possibility of people claiming that someone at the school has unfairly affected the outcome of the election, not counted votes etc. We also know what we are doing, because we are running elections all the time. While your kura may hold elections only once every three years, we are running by-elections, mid-term elections and other elections all the time, so we are always up to date with the rules and requirement for school board elections.

Schooled Election Pilot is the ONLY provider to have been accredited by the Ministry of Education continuously from when electronic election were introduced in 2022. We launched an entirely new electronic election platform in 2025 based on what we learnt from our three years of running online elections, and we were able to significantly improve our systems to make them simpler for all users.

To run an electronic school board election, the legislation requires the school or kura to provide personal and contact information to the Returning Officer, even though the parents have not signed up to this service themselves. This is why Schooled Election Pilot takes data security and safety very seriously. We have high levels of encryption and security on our back-end systems, limits on who can access personal information and a Safer Technologies 4 Schools (ST4S) certification.

We can handle all your election needs:

• 2026 mid-term elections (For schools and kura who use the staggered election cycle)
• Parent, Staff and Student by-elections
• 2028 triennial elections

When you appoint Schooled Election Pilot as your Returning Officer, we do almost everything for you, so you and your team can focus on your kura. We will work with you to organise the integration with your Student Management System (SMS) to give us the information we need for the electoral roll (for staff elections, we will contact you for a staff listing), then we will handle the nominations, voting, generate the declaration of results and notify candidates.

We have an election handbook that has all the information you need, including sample notices and communications, to make sure your election meets all the requirements of the legislation.

But what is it going to cost me?

Well, this is the best bit… Generally, nothing at all. This is because the Ministry of Education provides specific funding for parent elections, (including triennial, mid-term and by-elections). Our fees use the same formula as the Ministry Funding, so the money coming in is generally the same as the money going out.

Even better, our fees are all inclusive. There are no additional costs, hidden fees or extra charges for postage. We make it as easy as possible for you to run an engaging election so you can concentrate on the other important things at your kura.

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What is the difference between an electronic election and a paper election?

This might seem like an obvious question, but we get a lot of people trying to understand which is the best for their kura. We recommend an electronic election for the following key reasons:

You will get better engagement.

People are time poor, and families are no different. If you don’t run an electronic election, you are required to post out voting papers. These take longer to get to the voter (if they make it at all), and then the voter has to fill in the form and send it back. These are all roadblocks that stop people from getting involved.

The quality of your data for an electronic election is better.

Most kura are communicating day-to-day electronically, either by email or through an app for your kura, so the email addresses for your community are generally very up to date. By comparison, the postal addresses are often out of date. It isn’t uncommon for whānau to move at some point after a student is enrolled with your kura, but letting you know the new addresses is often something that gets overlooked. Because of this, if you post your nomination or voting packs out there will be several people who will not receive these. There is a waste in paper and the cost of postage when these don’t get to their destination, but even worse is that these whanau are also excluded from your election.

If you select an electronic election with Schooled Election Pilot, we will use email as the primary communication method with your community. However, if you have some whanau who don’t have email, or you don’t have an email address for them, we will still post paper copies to them as required by current legislation. It’s the best of both worlds!

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Do electronic elections have better results?

We are confident that our election platform provides better results than postal voting or other electronic providers, and we have the stats to back it up.

For the 2025 triennial school board elections, we ran more elections than anyone else… Over 1600 elections across over 950 kura and covering about 53% of the total student population in Aotearoa. Typically, about 50% of all parent school board elections go to a vote, and the voter turnout is about 21%, but we saw just under 74% of all parent elections go to a vote, and a voter turnout rate of 29%, showing we had a higher level of engagement with candidates and voters.

When we did a survey after the elections to the kura we had supported we had an overall approval score of 8.7 out of 10. Considering we used a brand new election platform for these elections we are very happy with that result. We have also taken onboard much of the feedback and since made improvements to our system for future elections.

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