Cut-price funding worth just half a sandwich, NZEI says

7 September 2016

A new targeted schooling grant that will deliver less than $2 a week per child for about 133,000 children from benefit-dependent families is a cut-price policy that won't impact significantly on the children needing it most, NZEI Te Riu Roa says.

Schools will hear today about their 2017 funding allocation, including the amount of a new targeted funding grant they will receive, after a data-matching exercise between the Ministry of Education and MSD identified children who have been in benefit-dependent households for 75% or more of their last five years.

NZEI Te Riu Roa President Louise Green says: "The fact is that this targeted fund is worth less than half-a sandwich per child. Schools are under-funded and the education budget needs to increase if we are to see all children have an equal chance to succeed."

"This tiny amount of targeted funding comes at the expense of a 1% increase in overall school operational funding. When you take inflation into account this amounts to a freeze on funding to schools."

She says using targeting without an increase in universal funding was simply 'robbing Peter to pay Paul'.

"You can't turn around rampant inequality outside the school gate with crumbs inside it. Schools need much more significant resourcing.

"This policy ignores poverty, so children of working families on low incomes who don't fit the limited criteria chosen by the Government could get less learning support than they currently do. These children will be affected by the freeze on the rest of the operations grant which puts increased pressure on schools' ability to pay the teacher aides and the other learning support these children need."

Treasury has already warned the Government's decision to target the funding was unlikely to be effective. Schools have not been told which children they will receive the funding for - and are not required to report on how it is spent.(1)

Louise Green said it did not make sense to intensify resourcing to a small group of children identified through one narrow indicator if it was at the expense of many more children without that "risk factor" who also need learning support to succeed at school.

1) "Characteristics of Children at Risk", p5, Treasury 2016, notes that measuring risk is inexact. It identifies that of 144,000 children aged 0-14 leaving school without gaining qualifications, only one-third (46,900) have indicators of high risk. 107,100 children have no or only one indicator, but also fail to gain a qualification. Conversely, 35% of children predicted to be at "high risk" do not in fact experience poor outcomes.

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