4 December 2007

Minister announces new funding for decile changes

Education Minister Chris Carter today announced $5.7 million in government assistance to give schools more time to adjust to changes in decile rankings.

“Schools say they were not given enough time to prepare this time round, so this funding is aimed at giving them that extra time,” Chris Carter said. “Adversely-affected schools will lose only half the amount they would otherwise have in 2008.

The full affect of the decile recalibration for affected schools will not now take effect until the beginning of 2009, giving schools another year to adjust their budgets.

"This year, the methodology the Ministry of Education used to determine decile ratings was the most fair and robust it has ever used,” the Minister said.

“The new ENROL Student Management System allowed the Ministry to use the addresses of every student, rather than just a sample, and gave a more complete picture of the socio economic conditions of households in each school’s area.”

The Minister reiterated that one third of schools got increased funding in the latest rankings, another third had no change and a third lost some money.

The Labour-led government has announced a 4 percent increase in operational funding to schools for next year. On average, decile funding represents around 11 percent of the total operational funding received by schools. Overall the proportion of change in decile rankings is the same as in 2002 but some individual schools have had larger differences in their funding than in previous years.

Decile-linked funding provides additional resources to schools to overcome barriers to learning that students from lower socio economic backgrounds can face. Schools are divided into 10 deciles, with approximately the same proportion of schools in each decile. Deciles are recalculated after each census.

The five factors that are measured to allocate deciles are: household income, occupation, household crowding, educational qualifications, and the percentage of parents accessing income support.

Schools will hear shortly of the results of any appeals they have made against new decile rankings.

ENDS

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