Schools to lose the ‘stigma’ of decile rating
The Government will replace the decile system for schools with an anonymous targeted funding initiative.
The new ‘‘risk index’’ would allow the Government to better target funding at schools that needed it the most and remove stigma from low-decile schools, Education Minister Nikki Kaye said yesterday.
The new model will probably take effect from 2019 or 2020. No school will lose any money it is currently allocated.
The index is likely to look at the risk of a student not passing NCEA level 2 using 16 indicators, including beneficiary status, the age of the mother when the child was born, ethnicity, and income. The list of indicators has not been finalised.
The data would be anonymised, and parents would not be able to judge potential schools on their place within the risk index, as they can now with the decile system.
‘‘For too long, schools have been stigmatised and wrongly judged by their decile number,’’ Kaye said.
‘‘The Cabinet has agreed to replace the decile system with a risk index that allows us to better target funding to schools with children and young people most at risk of not achieving due to disadvantage.
‘‘Rather than allocating this funding on the basis of neighbourhood characteristics, as the current decile system does, the risk index will instead provide fairer funding that better reflects the needs of children in our schools and services.’’
Deciles had led to some parents not sending a child to a certain school as they didn’t think it was up to scratch, when in reality it could have some of the best teaching in the country, Kaye said.
The decile system ranked schools from one to 10 to reflect the socio-economic background of their communities, and targeted funding on that basis.
Kaye said decile funding accounted for only about 3 per cent of operational funding.
The announcement was the start to the conversation, but time would tell whether its successor would work, New Zealand Educational Institute president Lynda Stuart said.
The ministry needed to make sure the replacement model would not stigmatise students in another way, she said.
Post Primary Teachers’ Association president Jack Boyle said there had been some unintended consequences of deciles, and allocating money more effectively could not really be argued against.
As the ministry worked through how money would be distributed, it needed to stay in close consultation with the sector, Boyle said.