Some school pupils are working up to 40 hours a week, including overnight shifts, to help their families pay the bills. The education minister says the problem causes long-term damage to students' future prospects.
Students from Auckland's Tamaki College and Sir Edmund Hillary Collegiate told TVNZ's Q&A that working sometimes long hours was what they had to do to help keep the lights on and put food on the table.
Some of their teachers were even helping out with essential bills, including for power.
A student in Ōtāhuhu told RNZ reporter Tom Taylor: "I do construction, 26 hours a week. It's pretty hard because I'm in school and I have to work every day after school but I'll keep on going. After training [I work] till 12 or 1 in the morning. No homework, straight to sleep."
Another said they worked at KFC: "This week I worked six days, 40 hours, because I can't do over 40 hours.
"I start at 3 or 4:30 after school and finish at 12 in the night ... to help out my family, helping them is good."
Minister of Education and Child Poverty Reduction Jan Tinetti told Checkpoint the problem caused long-term damage to students' future prospects, but would also be difficult to tackle.
Minister of Education and Child Poverty Reduction Jan Tinetti Photo: RNZ / Angus Dreaver
The issue is "distressing and not acceptable, that these students are working those long hours outside of school hours to help their families get by," she said.
"Education gives them choices, and that limits their ability to take those choices up."
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Tinetti said while there was no data collected on the problem, principals had been telling the Ministry of Education there was "an upswing" of students working long hours outside school.
"We also know that this requires a all-of-government approach to this. One thing we have done in education is we have looked at and have changed the equity funding index within education, meaning more funding to go into schools.
"And many schools are using that to increase the number of pastoral care hours, to help identify the issues, but also approaches that we can take in that all-of-government way to support those families.
Those funds could not be used to directly pay students to turn up, or to help them cover those household bills, she said.
"What they can do is ... identify the problem; What are the supports that that family needs to enable that young person to be working less hours? So what are they missing out on?
"Those are the sorts of things that in my experience at a decile 1 school that our pastoral support people were able to get in, they were able to find the wrap-around supports needed for those families and organise to get those wrap-around supports in place."
When challenged that the problem was producing a second generation of working poor, she agreed: "Absolutely."
"We know that this is a very complex situation. We know that what interventions we've put in are showing child poverty rates reducing.
"But we know there is so much left to do and that's why we now need to look at those way more complex solutions that we can apply, and those are the discussions that I've got going on - this is all-of-government , this isn't just on education, we need to look at how we can wrap around to reduce this inequity."
She acknowledged that there were teachers who had paid to help a student take one less shift to attend school, or help pay an essential bill. And said it was long-standing issued, though it had never been right. She said schools and teachers did an amazing job.
Tinetti said the government had "reduced child poverty so far - but now we are getting to that stubborn part of it.
"And that's where we need to look at those much more difficult issues that are obviously causing what is going on at the moment. We know there's long-standing inequities, particularly for our Māori and Pacific students.
"So that's where we need to look at solutions, with those out in community at the moment, it's not just there's all-of government, but it's about what are the solutions that those NGOs know are going to work best."