Schooled

Our History

School isn’t just in our name, its in our DNA.

Our history goes back over 36 years, all the way back to 1989 (the same year the original Batman movie, Honey, I shrunk the kids, and When Harry met Sally… were released and The B-52’s Love Shack, Fine Young Cannibals She drives me crazy and Public Enemy’s Fight the power were blearing from our radios!).

The Tomorrows Schools reforms came into effect in New Zealand on 1 October 1989 which decentralised much of the administration and governance of all state schools for the first time. Things such as accounting, governance, employment of teachers etc moved from the Education Board to individual school Boards of Trustees.  A number of Canterbury schools decided to set up a non-profit cooperative organisation to provide accounting services for them and other local schools, and Canterbury Education Services Society Limited (CES) was born.

We expanded from accounting to include election support in 1992, supporting schools with board elections by acting as the Returning Officer for elections.

CES expanded out of Canterbury in 2002, opening an Auckland office in East Tamaki to support schools in the North Island.

In 2003 CES started offering conferences for school admin and property staff.  The number of conferences, topics and where they were offered all expanded over time to ensure they are always relevant to the sector.

In 2022 we purchased Leading Edge Services, which became our Auckland West office.  This increased our presence in Auckland and also increased the number of clients we support.

With the introduction of the Education & Training Act 2020 online voting was allowed for state and state-integrated school boards, from the 2022 triennial election and CES was the only company accredited by the Ministry of Education to provide online elections.  We were the Returning Officer for over 450 schools and kura at the 2022 triennial elections.

After a lot of work done behind the scenes the shareholding schools of CES voted in mid-2024 to restructure the organisation to ensure it was set up to continue support the wider education sector into the future.   This restructure led to the establishment of the CES Foundation and Schooled as separate entities with Schooled focusing on the work that CES had done and the CES Foundation focusing on the charitable work of supporting the education sector in Aotearoa New Zealand, including Early Childhood, primary, intermediate and secondary education.  While we are no longer owned by schools, we are still very committed to improving education in Aotearoa.

On 1 October 2024, exactly 35 years after CES started, the organisation was renamed to Schooled and we started operating under our new name.

For the 2025 school board triennial elections we completely rebuilt our online election platform based on what we had learnt running online elections for the last three years with the aim being to provide an election system that was as easy to use as possible for everyone and also provided the highest level of safety and security of voter data.  This saw us support more schools and kura than ever and are the only online election provider to be continuously accredited by the Ministry of Education since online elections were introduced.  The 2025 triennial election saw us act as the Returning Officer for over 950 kura, running over 1 600 elections, managing over 8 000 candidates and over 750 000 voters!  During the election process we sent over 3.7 million emails through our election system and saw significant increases in participation with almost 74% of all parent elections going to a vote, compared to the 50% that is traditional and increase in the number of parents who participated on traditional numbers.

2026 will see us update our election system to be support non-school organisation and also school board or council elections outside of New Zealand.