Penny Lewis: Fine education down to rank?

A school's decile rating reflects a community's socio-economic assessment. Photo / Martin Sykes

Opinion

High-decile schools are not necessarily superior, says Penny Lewis.

Before I became a parent I couldn't understand what the fuss was about when it came to school zones. Surely all schools are created equal? Well, it turns out they're not.

Here's where I disclose that my family went to great pains to move into a specific zone for our daughters' primary school.

This is what I learned when I became a mum - when you give birth the placenta is expelled but Mother Nature replaces it with is a big fat dose of parental paranoia.

My family went to the trouble of renting, and then buying, in the school zone because we'd heard great things about our school and, apologies for the jargon, its values seemed to be aligned with ours.

That seems far removed from when we were kids, when you just went to whatever the local primary school was and, heavens, walked there on your own.

The reason we were so set on this particular school had nothing directly to do with its decile rating, which happens to be 10.

I have noticed that real estate agents sometimes advertise a property's local school as being decile 10 as if it were the equivalent of a high-achievement grade on a school report card. This can be confusing because a high-decile school is not necessarily better than a school with a lower rating. It all depends on your criteria.

As explained on the Ministry of Education's website, a school's decile rating indicates the extent to which it draws students from low socio-economic communities. "Decile 1 schools are the 10 per cent of schools with the highest proportion of students from low socio-economic communities, whereas decile 10 schools are the 10 per cent of schools with the lowest proportion of these students," the site says.

My interpretation is that, simply put, a high-decile school means it's located in a wealthier neighbourhood.

The Ministry of Education says the decile system is used to provide funding to state and state-integrated schools "to enable them to overcome the barriers to learning faced by students from low socio-economic communities". The lower the school's decile the more funding it receives.

This is with good reason, as you might have seen in this week's series in the New Zealand Herald which looked at children going hungry, many of whom attend low-decile schools. If there isn't money for food there simply isn't the money at home to provide what's needed for children to reach their potential.

The fact that our community's school is decile 10 means it relies on fundraising - not just for nice-to-have things but also for operational costs. This is a big ask for some families in the neighbourhood who aren't flush with cash. Thank goodness for a core group of parents who fundraise with fervour and put many hours of unpaid work into the school and its community. I can't see the need to fundraise ever ceasing, even when deciles are next reassessed. Decile reassessments are supposed to take place after each census, except, of course, the March census this year was cancelled after the February earthquake.

A Ministry of Education spokesman says there's no word yet on when deciles will be looked at again.

Whatever the next round of assessments brings, it's important to remember that a high decile doesn't mean a school is better than others, nor does a low decile mean a school is not a good one.

ON THE WEB
Ministry of Education website