Higher education
A new data map shows how whole communities in NZ’s bigger cities are bypassing their neighbourhood schools in search of wealthier options. Education reporter Dubby Henry and data specialist Chris McDowall find out why
Thousands of kids are criss-crossing cities to get into the wealthier schools of their choice
Thousands of kids are crisscrossing our big cities to get into the wealthier schools of their choice — and continuing a long trend of abandoning their neighbourhood lower-decile schools.
The patterns are clearly visible on a Herald interactive data map drawn from 2020 Ministry of Education data obtained under the Official Information Act.
The interactive map shows where young people in each neighbourhood go to school and from where every school draws its students.
Many of the results for individual schools and suburbs starkly illustrate what researchers call “decile drift” — that parents seek out higher-decile schools than the ones in their neighbourhood, especially at secondary level and in Auckland, leading to schools in poorer areas shrinking. In many schools, that’s led to increasing segregation along class and racial lines.
Yet the map also shows that while some schools are not seen as desirable by people who live locally, kids from all over the city will flock there from less popular schools — almost always further down the decile ladder.
That’s despite extensive research showing school decile is not an indicator of quality — in fact lowerdecile schools frequently outperform their higher-decile counterparts, once non-school factors are accounted for. So if parents don’t gain educational advantages for their children, why avoid lower-decile schools?
Do deciles matter?
The decile system was created to help fund equity, not as a label of achievement or teaching quality. It’s now considered an outdated tool which is at best a blunt indicator of poverty or disadvantage. But a report by former Edgewater College principal Allan Vester found deciles were still used as a “synonym for quality”, with high deciles used by real-estate agents as a marketing tool to sell houses, and by schools as a lure to enrol more kids.
Vester also found a clear pattern that school size was related to decile, but it wasn’t the absolute decile that was most important. Instead, the key predictor of parents’ school choice was getting away from the lowestdecile school in their area. What was considered a low decile in one area may be high in another.
Edgewater College in Pakuranga bears this out. While the decile 4 school consistently loses high numbers of students to higher-decile schools nearby, like Howick College (decile 8) and Pakuranga College (decile 7), the Herald’s interactive tool also shows scores of students going to Edgewater from neighbourhoods near Tamaki College and Tangaroa College, both of which are decile 1.
Ministry of Education roll-return data for 2020 shows roughly twice as many kids now attend the highestdecile schools as attend the lowest deciles. As low-decile school rolls have fallen, roll-based funding has evaporated, leading to dilapidated classrooms and high staff turnover.
High-decile schools can also draw on community resources to offer more extracurricular activities, further stacking the deck against shrinking schools where such options are limited. And as the Herald’s interactive shows, kids who live next door to each other scatter across the city as they get older, increasing transport congestion and weakening bonds with their communities.
Tomorrow’s Schools and parents’ choice
Waikato University Professor of Education Martin Thrupp says there are complicated reasons behind why parents send their children to particular schools.
Thrupp has researched the trends ever since the 1990s, when the neoliberal policies of the Tomorrow’s Schools reforms made school choice and competition the norm in New Zealand. As has been extensively documented, the reforms led to “winner” and “loser” schools as middleclass parents pulled out all the stops to get their kids into the “right” school, often at the expense of their local one.
“There’s a strong body of opinion amongst educators and some parents that your own individual background determines how you’ll get on and you’ll do just as well in a low socioeconomic school,” Thrupp said.
But he believed middle-class parents clustered their children together for a reason — there were advantages to attending middle-class schools.
Those advantages included peer effects, such as being surrounded by other students who expect to go to university, and classroom effects, where teachers might pitch their lesson at a particular academic level. The “old school tie” network effect also saw some wealthier schools overrepresented in elite fields such as politics, law or medicine.
“But having said all that . . . I do believe that if the Government chose to advantage lower-socioeconomic schools with more staff and more resources, that does to some extent counter the advantages of middleclass settings.”
One school of thought insisted that there were positives to ethnic segregation, Thrupp said.
“For instance, most Maori educators don’t see any problem with schools that are largely catering for Maori students, they see it as a positive, on the grounds of being able to promote the growth of Maori language and culture.”
The concern was with the way socioeconomic inequalities also tend to follow ethnic segregation, through both where people lived, and where they sent their children. Thrupp believed most parents didn’t think about the effect their school choice might have on the rest of the community.
“There’s a place, I think, for more public discussion about the costs of not attending your local school.”
You can’t separate racism from classism and elitism
While all ethnic groups have moved away from low-decile schools, Pakeha kids have moved the most — a 2012 report found the number of Pakeha in low-decile schools had halved in a decade. At the time, the Ministry of Education denied white flight was to blame, pointing to demographic changes for the trend.
But AUT School of Education associate professor Georgina Stewart believed the increasing segregation in New Zealand schools was a reflection of “the long, slow, breaking down of social egalitarianism in this country”.
She had always chosen to teach in schools with a high Ma¯ori population, which “inevitably” meant they were low decile. In her time teaching at Tikipunga College in Whanga¯rei, she saw the local kids passing by the decile 2 school’s gates to get to Whanga¯rei Girls and Boys Highs, both decile 5. Those schools’ rolls were bursting at the seams, while hers had room to spare.
Stewart believed there was a “huge myth” in New Zealand that poorer people, and particularly poorer Ma¯ori, weren’t ambitious for their kids.“There’s a very strong myth that Ma¯ori parents don’t care about education. Not many people would openly say that Ma¯ori people are inherently dumb, so . . . nowadays it’s that they make bad lifestyle choices.
“The majority of these families are living very small lives but they’re still doing the best they can for their kids,” she said.
She didn’t know why individual parents decided to avoid low-decile schools — but “you can’t separate racism from classism and elitism”.
“It’s all part of the same structure . . . of symbolic violence. There’s violence in the idea that I will spend an hour trucking my kid across a city to get away from a school with so many brown kids in it.”
Every person spoken to for this article said parents were doing what they thought was best for their child. But the options for the wealthy were far greater, Stewart said.
“Regardless of the current policy about school zones, wealthy parents will always use the greater level of options, and I guess power in the market, to advantage themselves.”
Missing an enormous opportunity
Auckland Girls’ Grammar School principal Ngaire Ashmore is uniquely placed to appreciate these trends. Her decile 3 school is in wealthy central Auckland, and the Herald’s data shows few local girls attend. But the school is seen as desirable to her mostly Ma¯ori and Pasifika students who travel for hours across Auckland, often making big sacrifices to get there.
In the 1960s and 70s, the neighbourhood had many Ma¯ori and Pasifika families who attended AGGS. But as they moved to the suburbs, and the surrounding areas of Ponsonby and Grey Lynn gentrified, it became rare for local girls to go to AGGS.
Just 23 Pa¯keha¯ students attended AGGS last year, out of a roll of 943, according to ministry records. And the Herald’s data shows not a single girl from affluent Herne Bay was recorded as attending AGGS, despite being in zone.
Instead, those girls choosing single-sex schools went to private or state-integrated schools such as Diocesan and St Mary’s. Those choosing state co-ed mostly went to Western Springs, a decile 8 school whose zone overlaps with AGGS.
That couldn’t be because of the quality of education at AGGS, Ashmore said. NZQA data shows the school’s NCEA achievement levels are well above the average for all Auckland, not just for decile 3.
Possibly some Pa¯keha¯ parents were thinking, “My daughter’s going to be a minority in a sea of brown faces”, Ashmore said.
“I don’t think about white flight. I think people make choices, for a whole lot of reasons.
“Some around racism and race, and some around ‘Where are my daughters going to get the best connections’.”
But she didn’t believe her students felt hard done by if locals went elsewhere — instead, “those that live locally and are choosing elsewhere are missing out on an enormous opportunity,” she said.
Ashmore believed AGGS was a “microcosm” of greater Auckland. “Ma¯ori and Pacific young people are going to be the majority of our population in the future.
“Imagine your daughters having friends that live all over Auckland and have experiences of life you don’t have . . . We talk about kindness, really understanding people who live in our wider communities but unless you’re really rubbing shoulders with them day to day you really are just on the outside looking in.”
The Herald’s interactive shows AGGS girls come from across Auckland, particularly the south. Ashmore said her school in turn could be seen as taking good students from elsewhere but pointed out there was no other single-sex state school available in the south Auckland area.
She spent 10 years as principal of Tangaroa College in O¯tara, where many parents didn’t have the disposable income to choose a school that wasn’t local.
She remembered thinking that “if we had all the amazing students within that community come to Tangaroa College, this would be a better school, but . . . I’m not sure if I agree with that argument anymore”.
“People in that school work so hard to make sure that those for whom local school is their only choice, they get the absolute best education.”
Support for change
Education laws give students the right to attend a “reasonably convenient” school, and despite the decades of school competition, many principals now think students should be attending their local school.
Stephen Lethbridge, president of the Auckland Primary Principals Association, said APPA’s position was that local was best for most kids.
“You go to school in that community, that’s your place in the world. You have your links, you have your ties there.” Long travel times were also “challenging” for children.
Lethbridge, principal of Pt Chevalier Primary, said there was anecdotal evidence that some decile drift happened at primary although it was more pronounced at high school.
There were always exceptions but on the whole “it’s really important that local schools are the option — making sure we’re not oversubscribing in some places and have ghost schools in other places.”
Secondary Principals’ Association president Vaughan Couillault said there was a broad church of views among principals due to the longstanding culture of school choice — with some schools without a zone taking students from “all over the place” and others who had a hard zone boundary.
Steve Hargreaves, president of the Auckland Secondary Schools’ Principals’ Association, said high school complicated the picture because of decisions around school type — like co-ed or single sex, and special character schools.
Given that, “ideally students would all be at a close school that meets their needs, not based on decile,” he said.
“Just about every [principal] agrees with that because that would mean we had a very strong education system.”
As Auckland’s student population booms, it may be that flight away from some schools is beginning to reverse. The opportunity to get into a “desirable” school from out of zone is shrinking, as the most popular schools have hit maximum capacity and started closing their ballots. Even schools with previously low rolls are finding their student numbers increasing thanks to infill housing.
Education minister Chris Hipkins believes the benefits of competition have run their course, and the Government’s position is that competition between schools “has made it harder to share good practice and exacerbated ethnic and socioeconomic segregation”.
Following an independent review of Tomorrow’s Schools, changes are in the works to make our schooling system fairer. The Ministry of Education has taken over the power to create enrolment zones and is focused on efficiency — avoiding spending money on new classrooms at popular schools when there’s space at the school down the road. It plans to create zones at almost every school in Auckland by the end of next year.
Deciles were also to be scrapped this year, replaced with an equity index which brings funding for each disadvantaged student, but that’s on hold till 2023 due to the pandemic.
Hipkins in the past has welcomed the effects of population growth which forced schools in Auckland to adopt zones, limiting competition.
But he said it had taken 30 years for New Zealand to get here — and would take another 15-20 to rebalance.
“We are going to have to bring parents along for the journey.”
Note: The dataset used in the interactive comes from student’s addresses that schools provided to the Ministry of Education for March 2020 (the most recent available), so the MoE can’t vouch for its accuracy. Not all schools provide this data, particularly private schools. Boarding schools could also skew the results as some schools may enter students’ addresses differently.
There’s a very strong myth that M¯aori parents don’t care about education.
Georgina Stewart