In the
New Zealand education system, decile is a key measure of
socioeconomic status
Socioeconomic status (SES) is an economic and sociological combined total measure of a person's work experience and of an individual's or family's economic access to resources and social position in relation to others. When analyzing a family's ...
used to target funding and support schools. In academic contexts the full term "socioeconomic decile" or "socioeconomic decile band" may be used.
A school's decile indicates the extent to which the school draws its students from low socioeconomic communities. Decile 1 schools are the 10% of schools with the highest proportion of students from low socio-economic communities.
This system was implemented in 1995. Its exact nature has changed since then.
Details
A school's socioeconomic decile is recalculated by the Ministry of Education every five years, using data collected after each
Census of Population and Dwellings. They are calculated between censuses for new schools and merged schools, and other schools may move up or down one decile with school openings, mergers and closures to ensure each decile contains 10 percent of all schools. Current deciles were calculated in 2014 following the 2013 census (delayed two years due to the
2011 Christchurch earthquake
A major earthquake occurred in Christchurch on Tuesday 22 February 2011 at 12:51 p.m. local time (23:51 UTC, 21 February). The () earthquake struck the entire of the Canterbury region in the South Island, centred south-east ...
). The previous deciles came into force in 2008 following the
2006 census
6 (six) is the natural number following 5 and preceding 7. It is a composite number and the smallest perfect number.
In mathematics
Six is the smallest positive integer which is neither a square number nor a prime number; it is the second small ...
.
Before the deciles are calculated,
Statistics New Zealand
Statistics New Zealand ( mi, Tatauranga Aotearoa), branded as Stats NZ, is the public service department of New Zealand charged with the collection of statistics related to the economy, population and society of New Zealand. To this end, Stats ...
calculates the following factors in each individual
meshblock
Mesh blocks or meshblocks are a small geographic unit used in the census of several countries.
New Zealand
New Zealand's countrywide meshblock framework was first set up in 1976, although the term dates back to at least the 1916 census. The me ...
(the smallest census unit, consisting of about 50 households each), disregarding any household in the meshblock that does not have school-aged children:
* Household income: the proportion of households whose total income, adjusted for householder composition, is in the bottom 20 percent nationally
* Occupation: the proportion of employed parents who work in low-skilled or unskilled occupations, specifically those that have skill-levels 4 and 5 on the
Australian and New Zealand Standard Classification of Occupations (ANZSCO)
* Household crowding: the proportion of households which are overcrowded, that is, in which there are more people living in the house than there are bedrooms, adjusting for couples and children under 10.
* Educational qualifications: the proportion of parents who have no formal qualifications
* Income support: the proportion of parents who receive the
Domestic Purposes Benefit
The Domestic Purposes Benefit (DPB) is a social welfare payment in New Zealand's social security system, primarily given to single parents with dependent children. It, along with all other benefit payments, was managed by Work and Income, under t ...
,
Unemployment Benefit
Unemployment benefits, also called unemployment insurance, unemployment payment, unemployment compensation, or simply unemployment, are payments made by authorized bodies to unemployed people. In the United States, benefits are funded by a compu ...
,
Sickness Benefit or Invalid's Benefit
Each school provides a list of the addresses of its students to determine which meshblocks are used. For each of the five factors, the average for the school is found by adding together the factor in each of the applicable meshblocks, adjusting for the number of students at the school living in each meshblock. All schools in New Zealand are then listed in order for each factor, and given a percentile for that factor. The percentiles for each factor are then added together to give a score out of 500. When the score is ordered, the list of schools is divided into ten, giving one of the ten deciles.
This gives a broad measure of the
relative poverty
The poverty threshold, poverty limit, poverty line or breadline is the minimum level of income deemed adequate in a particular country. The poverty line is usually calculated by estimating the total cost of one year's worth of necessities for t ...
, or aggregated socioeconomic (or
social class
A social class is a grouping of people into a set of Dominance hierarchy, hierarchical social categories, the most common being the Upper class, upper, Middle class, middle and Working class, lower classes. Membership in a social class can for ...
), of the parents or care-givers of students at the school, with
decile
In descriptive statistics, a decile is any of the nine values that divide the sorted data into ten equal parts, so that each part represents 1/10 of the sample or population. A decile is one possible form of a quantile; others include the quartile ...
1 schools being the 10% of schools with the lowest socioeconomic communities and decile 10 schools being at the other end of the scale.
Note that some types of schools acquire a decile rating regardless of the socioeconomic status of the school community. For example,
teen-parent units always "belong" in decile 1, because of the inherent effect teenage pregnancy and parenthood has on teen parents' socioeconomic status, regardless whether the teen-parent unit is in a high
SES
SES, S.E.S., Ses and similar variants can refere to:
Business and economics
* Socioeconomic status
* Scottish Economic Society, a learned society in Scotland
* SES, callsign of the TV station SES/RTS (Mount Gambier, South Australia)
* SES S.A., ...
area or attached to a high-decile school.
Decile ratings apply only for the funding of
compulsory education
Compulsory education refers to a period of education that is required of all people and is imposed by the government. This education may take place at a registered school or at other places.
Compulsory school attendance or compulsory schooling ...
, but a number of different central-government funding-streams and support services to schools are strongly affected by the decile rating of a school, with more funding available to lower-decile schools. The funding and support measures include:
# Targeted Funding for Educational Achievement (TFEA) (Deciles 1–9)
# Special Education Grant (SEG) (Deciles 1–10)
#
Careers
The career is an individual's metaphorical "journey" through learning, work and other aspects of life. There are a number of ways to define career and the term is used in a variety of ways.
Definitions
The ''Oxford English Dictionary'' defin ...
Information Grant (CIG) (Deciles 1–10, Years 9–13 only)
#
Kura Kaupapa Maori Transport (Deciles 1–10)
# Priority Teacher Supply Allowance (PTSA) (Deciles 1–2)
# National Relocation Grant (NRG) (Deciles 1–4)
# Decile Discretionary Funding for Principals (Deciles 1–4)
# Resource Teachers of Learning and Behaviour (RTLBs) Learning Support Funding (Deciles 1–10)
# RTLBs for years 11–13 (Deciles 1–10)
# School Property Financial Assistance scheme (Deciles 1–10)
# Study Support Centres (Deciles 1–3)
#
Social Workers
Social work is an academic discipline and practice-based profession concerned with meeting the basic needs of individuals, families, groups, communities, and society as a whole to enhance their individual and collective well-being. Social work ...
in Schools (Deciles 1–5)
# District
Truancy
Truancy is any intentional, unjustified, unauthorised, or illegal absence from compulsory education. It is a deliberate absence by a student's own free will (though sometimes adults or parents will allow and/or ignore it) and usually does not refe ...
Service (Deciles 1–10)
For the 2015 year, the decile-based funding rates are as follows:
Statistical data
In the pursuit of knowledge, data (; ) is a collection of discrete values that convey information, describing quantity, quality, fact, statistics, other basic units of meaning, or simply sequences of symbols that may be further interpreted. ...
about primary and secondary schools and their students can be broken down into socioeconomic deciles. For example, data released by the Ministry of Education shows correlations between high decile schools and higher rates of attaining
NCEA Level 2, higher rates of tertiary education entrance, and lower rates of
truancy
Truancy is any intentional, unjustified, unauthorised, or illegal absence from compulsory education. It is a deliberate absence by a student's own free will (though sometimes adults or parents will allow and/or ignore it) and usually does not refe ...
. (Note that socioeconomic decile alone
does not necessarily cause these statistics).
Examples
The following table lists the decile ratings of thirty state secondary schools in Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch and Dunedin.
Criticism
The decile system has come in for criticism from the
teacher
A teacher, also called a schoolteacher or formally an educator, is a person who helps students to acquire knowledge, competence, or virtue, via the practice of teaching.
''Informally'' the role of teacher may be taken on by anyone (e.g. whe ...
and
principal associations in recent years for fomenting destructive competition between schools and the exacerbation of
white flight
White flight or white exodus is the sudden or gradual large-scale migration of white people from areas becoming more racially or ethnoculturally diverse. Starting in the 1950s and 1960s, the terms became popular in the United States. They refer ...
. Data from the
Ministry of Education
An education ministry is a national or subnational government agency politically responsible for education. Various other names are commonly used to identify such agencies, such as Ministry of Education, Department of Education, and Ministry of Pub ...
indicated that 60,000
Pakeha/NZ European students attended low-decile schools in 2000, but that number had halved by 2010, while high-decile schools had a corresponding increase in Pakeha students. The Ministry claimed demographic changes were behind the shifts, but the Secondary Principals Association and
PPTA have attributed white flight to racial and class stigmas of low-decile schools, which commonly have majority Maori and Pacific Islander rolls.
A visiting
Fulbright Scholar
The Fulbright Program, including the Fulbright–Hays Program, is one of several United States Cultural Exchange Programs with the goal of improving intercultural relations, cultural diplomacy, and intercultural competence between the people of ...
, Professor Chris Lubienski, carried out research that found discrepancies in 36 of the 49 secondary school zones in
Auckland
Auckland (pronounced ) ( mi, Tāmaki Makaurau) is a large metropolitan city in the North Island of New Zealand. The List of New Zealand urban areas by population, most populous urban area in the country and the List of cities in Oceania by po ...
. According to Prof Lubienski, principals of schools in the 36 zones anonymously confessed to deliberately skewing their zone boundaries, in order to encourage the enrolment of students from wealthier backgrounds, while preventing the enrolment of poorer students to these schools. In response,
Mount Albert Grammar School
Mount Albert Grammar School, commonly known as MAGS, is a co-educational state secondary school in Mount Albert in Auckland, New Zealand. It teaches students in year levels 9 to 13. , Mount Albert Grammar School is the second largest school in ...
headmaster Dale Burden countered that school zones "cannot be easily manipulated and changing them is a transparent process". The Ministry of Education issued the following statement:
The purpose of an enrolment zone is to ensure the selection of applicants for enrolment is fair and transparent and makes the best use of the school network.
As far as possible, an enrolment scheme must not exclude local students so that no more students are excluded from a school than is necessary to avoid over-crowding.
The ministry has recently updated guidelines on enrolments zones. They make clear that before drawing up an enrolment zone boards are required to consult parents and the wider community as well as other schools.
Householder income should not be considered when zones are drawn up.
The law requires a board to ensure all students can attend a reasonably convenient school while ensuring other schools do not experience enrolment problems.
If a school board is unable to agree a boundary arrangement the ministry can step in to resolve the matter. If necessary, the ministry has powers to require a board to amend a proposed enrolment zone.
Proposals to replace
In July 2017 Education Minister
Nikki Kaye
Nicola Laura Kaye (born 11 February 1980) is a New Zealand politician who served as Deputy Leader of the New Zealand National Party and Deputy Leader of the Opposition from 22 May 2020 to 14 July 2020.
Kaye served as the member of the New Zea ...
of the
Fifth National Government
Neville Chamberlain formed the Chamberlain war ministry in 1939 after declaring war on Germany. Chamberlain led the country for the first eight months of the Second World War, until the Norway Debate in Parliament led Chamberlain to resign a ...
announced plans to replace the system "...as early as 2019..." by a system of targeted funding based on how many "at risk" children a particular school has enrolled.
Her government lost power later in 2017.
In September 2019 the
Sixth Labour Government
The Sixth Labour Government has governed New Zealand since 26 October 2017. It is headed by Jacinda Ardern, the Labour Party leader and prime minister.
Following the 2017 general election held on 23 September, the New Zealand First party h ...
announced the decile system would be replaced by a new "
"Equity Index" which would come into effect as early as 2021.
In mid-May 2022, the
2022 New Zealand budget
Budget 2022, dubbed the Wellbeing Budget 2022, is the New Zealand budget for fiscal year 2022/23, presented to the New Zealand House of Representatives, House of Representatives by Finance Minister (New Zealand), Finance Minister, Grant Robertso ...
allocated $8 million for the capital cost and $293 million for operating costs for the new Equity index, but no date of introduction was given.
See also
*
Child poverty in New Zealand
New Zealand suffers from one of the worst rates of child poverty in the Western world. Child poverty affects 1 in 5, or roughly 210,500 children in New Zealand, as of the year ended June 2020 according to Statistics New Zealand. The number in 20 ...
*
Social class in New Zealand
Social class in New Zealand is a product of both Māori and Western social structures. Researchers have traditionally discussed New Zealand, a first-world country, as a "classless society", but this claim is problematic in a number of ways. Since ...
References
{{Reflist
External links
Information about deciles from Kiwi Families
New Zealand culture
Education in New Zealand
Socioeconomics
Affirmative action