March 22, 2016
Stigma free school funding method sought
Education Minister Hekia Parata says decile funding for schools is a blunt instrument and she wants to ts the right resources to the right child at the right time.
She's asked the Education Ministry to work on the new system which will require the marshalling of large amounts of information about the circumstances of individual children and their whanau.
The decile system is based on census data, taking into account the socio-economic circumstances of the communities where a school draws its pupils from.
Ms Parata says that means a lot of disruption every five years with winners and losers as schools gain or lose funding.
"What's happened over time is that lower deciles are stigmatized into having low quality teaching and higher deciles use it as a brand to attract parent's to their schools and neither of these things are true and the decile does not reflect the quality of teaching or leadership in those communities and so I'm as concerned to remove those stigma's as I am to get a better targeting system", says Mrs Parata.
Minister Parata says the next decile recalibration is not due until 2019, so there is plenty of time to develop the new system.
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