Winners and losers likely to change as deciles axed
Schools’ budgets to be based more precisely on family disadvantages
Some schools and childcare centres will be winners and others losers in a radical funding reshuffle in the next three years. Education Minister Chris Hipkins has announced Cabinet approval “in principle” to abolish the decile-based school funding system by 2021 or 2022. It will be replaced by a new “equity index” which will give schools and early childhood services more money based on 26 measures of the family backgrounds of each child in the school.
The change will be the biggest shift in the education funding system since deciles were introduced in 1995, and Hipkins’ paper for the Cabinet concedes that it “is likely to be disruptive for many schools and services”.
“There will be distributional impacts, with some schools and services becoming better off and others worse off,” the paper says. “This is due to the blunt and imprecise nature of decile.”
Hipkins plans to soften the impact of the funding reshuffle by increasing the total funding, possibly doubling the $150 million currently allocated through the decile system.
“Currently, 2.9 per cent of resourcing for schools, or around $150 million, is targeted for equity,” he said. “However, it is clear to the Government that current equity resourcing is not enough for schools to reduce the impacts of socioeconomic disadvantage for many of our students.”
The Cabinet paper says England, Northern Ireland, the Netherlands and the Australian state of Victoria all allocate 6 to 7 per cent of school funding on the basis of students’ family disadvantages.
It says lifting equity funding to 6 per cent of school funding in New Zealand would cost $340m or $190m a year more than the current spend.
But the Cabinet has not yet approved any more money and Hipkins says in the Cabinet paper that he will seek funding in next year’s Budget.
The current decile system funds schools on the basis of the socioeconomic status of the areas their students live in. This means that a needy family living in a wealthy area
may not generate any extra funding for the school its children attend.
The new index is still being developed, but the Cabinet paper says the current version would allocate funding to a school based on 26 measures of the family background of each child in the school.
All measures will be taken from Statistics NZ’s anonymised integrated data infrastructure and will be used to produce an index number for each school. The school will not be told the details about any individual students.
A spokesman for Hipkins said the measures would be weighted in line with the effect that each item had on average on each student’s performance in levels 1 and 2 of the National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA).
The data for each school will be updated annually.
Ratings will not be divided into 10 levels like deciles. The Cabinet paper suggests that they might be “on a scale with a median of 400 and a standard deviation of 50”, making them much
harder than deciles for the public to make sense of.
Principals’ Federation president Whetu Cormick said principals hoped the new system would predict the needs of each child more accurately.
National education spokeswoman Nikki Kaye said Hipkins had taken two years to gain Cabinet approval for a system that National proposed in 2016, and had still not won Cabinet approval for necessary extra funding.