Equality or Equity: Why the decile system is neither.

Despite the decile system and the hope of education parity, low decile schools continue to underperform and struggle to produce students with the same opportunities as those from high decile schools. They have higher rates of students who have issues beyond the scope of education such as poverty (Wylie, 2013). Students in poverty often live in conditions that hinder their ability to learn. Wylie (2013) offers an apt description of life for many low decile students. “Parents may find it impossible to feed them adequately or keep them healthy, clothes or clothes for school may be unaffordable; likewise, books and computers, paints, musical instruments or sports gear may be outside the family budget. Parents who are stressed from the daily challenge of making ends meet will be less able to give children the interaction that helps them develop. Life on a low income can hinder parents engagement with a child’s school, limiting parent -teacher interaction.” Lower decile schools are drawing their student populations from more socially and economically disadvantaged communities. Not only are these students often more fiscally disadvantaged, the lower decile schools also have more difficulty drawing on other resources such as knowledge, networks and opportunities for their students in and out of the classroom (Wylie, 2013). 

The whole idea of the decile system was to provide educational parity for students across socio-economic levels. However, a 2012 study found that the funding that the decile system provides is nowhere near enough to  combat the socio-economic background of the students or to match higher decile schools. Wylie (2013) states “A comparison of the total income of five decile 1 and five decile 10 primary schools found that the decile 10 schools had about $1,100 more to spend per student each year than the decile 1 schools. The decile 1 schools’ income per student amounted to about $7,518 per student; the decile 10 schools’, about $8,653. Yet one US study estimated that students from poor homes needed 40% to 100 % more funding per student to provide equitable learning opportunities.^” All these factors combined contribute to the continued inequalities we still see in education.  

PISA (2016) found that more than half of the variation in mathematics scores between schools is associated with the socio-economic profile of the school. Recent research has shown that it is not actually the school that’s the problem but the socio-economic background of the students. Once decile is accounted for, the achievement across students at different decile schools is about equal. Hernandez (2019) states that   “inequality in education outcomes evident in school league tables is not a result of large differences in school quality, but rather large differences in family background characteristics, particularly differences in parental education.” This highlights one of the major issues with the decile system, being that it delivers funding to schools based on the community that the school is situated in but not based on the individual students that actually attend the school.

It also highlights the lack of government responsibility in terms of making non-educational issues education issues. Many continuous governments focused on within school solutions and failed to pay any attention to beyond school issues. This forces schools and teachers to try to be the answer to wider societal issues, which is an issue that needs more than just teachers to take responsibility for. 

References: 

Hernandez, J. (2019). Tomorrow’s Schools: Data and evidence. Wellington, New Zealand: The New Zealand Initiative

PISA (2016). Low performing students: Why they fall behind and How to help them succeed. Paris, France: OECD publishing 

Wylie, C.(2013) Schools and  Inequality. Wellington, New Zealand: Bridget William Books Ltd