The Government has confirmed it will replace the decile school funding system with one that targets money according to how many "at risk" children schools have enrolled.
Education Minister Nikki Kaye made the announcement this afternoon.
The decile system is based on the area from which a school draws its students. But attaching a number to each school has meant some parents avoid lower-decile schools, mistakenly linking a decile number with the quality of education.
Former Education Minister Hekia Parata has previously said a statistical "risk" index can target funding in a more "fine-grained way" by estimating for each student how at risk of educational underachievement they are.
It uses a range of indicators relating to each child, including how old the mother was at their birth, how many siblings the child has, parental income, father's offending history, and the child's ethnicity.
The Government is already testing a version of "at-risk" school funding. Schools this year did not get a general increase to operations funding to cover inflation. Instead, schools get $92 in extra funding for each student from a long-term, welfare-dependent background.
The at risk index would be a more sophisticated way to target extra money and would dish out far more money too.
"For too long schools have been stigmatised and wrongly judged by their decile number," Kaye said.
"Children and young people deserve to take pride in their school and we need to better target funding to where the need is greatest to support all children to achieve.
"Today I'm announcing that 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.
"We will also be replacing the equity index used to allocate disadvantage funding in early childhood education with the Risk Index."
Kaye said the specific factors to be used in the index had not yet been finalised.
"However, I'm pleased to be able to confirm that no school, early learning service or ngā kōhanga reo will see a reduction in their funding as a direct result of this change.
"In fact, we expect some will gain significantly."
The index will be finalised as part of the next stage of work, including which factorsare included. The factors being considered include: Proportion of time spent supported by benefits since birth
Child has a Child, Youth and Family notification
Mother’s age at child’s birth
Father’s offending and sentence history
Ethnicity
Youth Justice referral
Benefit mother unqualified
Proportion of time spent overseas since birth
Mother’s average earned income over the previous 5 years
School transience
Country of birth
Father’s average earned income over the previous 5 years
Migrant /New Zealand born
Number of children (mother)
Mother received third tier benefits (payments directed to alleviating hardship)
Most recent benefit male caregiver is not the birth father. 作者: sun2kiwi 时间: 2017-7-31 19:56:19