Google for Education Plus licencing update - action required.

[Steve Smith - Google for Education NZ]

Kia Ora all,

The below message pertains to Google for Education Plus licensing for staff.

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Starting February 1st, 2026, separate Staff licensing for Google Workspace for Education (Standard or Plus) became deprecated, moving into a single license model which covers both staff and students on the same license type.

For full article, view here: https://support.google.com/a/answer/16735286

Note: This licensing also unlocks the recent ai abilities in Vids, Docs,Sheets,Slides,Forms and soon Gmail. As well as the increased abilities in read along in google classroom.

Due to The Ministry of Education’s current agreement with Google, free licensing will continue to be provided at 4:1 ratio for state and state-integrated schools in Aotearoa. 

Upon each domain’s annual school licensing renewal, staff and student licensing will now merge into a single licensing type moving forward.

Your admin may have received notifications about this if you have renewed your licenses since Feb 1st. 

What you need to do:

You or your school IT service provider will need to follow the instructions below if your renewal is in Feb, March or April 2026.  After this time there will be a change in process that we will update you on closer to the time. 

• Action Required: To ensure service continuity, all staff licenses nearing renewal will enter a 30-day grace period. During this window, IT service providers or school IT administrators must actively re-assign all staff user licences  from the now combined Education plus license pool.

  • Schools with upcoming renewals should have already received notifications of their staff licenses being moved over to this grace plan. These notifications will also continue to be sent out for future upcoming renewals.

If you have any questions about the above, please reach out to your IT service provider or to me ,if you are self managed.

Ngā mihi maioha

Steve,

Google for Education

nzsteve @google.com

[Matt Strickland]

Hi Steve,

We are a school that's used both in the past, but now I am not allocating new GWfE or equiv licences to new students or staff (which means we are starting to see a pool of unallocated licences)

Can I request less licences on renewal? Or am I expected to remove all licences?

Is there a preferred method to remove one of these ecosystems that the Ministry would like to take if we are to choose one system?

Matt

[Steve Smith]

Hi Matt,

There are a couple of big questions in there that may be better for us to talk about off here.

Workspace plus licences need to be allocated to all students and teachers to enable all security, logging and teaching and learning abilities.

Your licencing is tied to your student numbers but if these have reduced you can reduce your paid licences.

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