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Can our school funding system be improved? Cathy Wylie
NZCER Researcher
The government’s current review of the systems for funding schools and early childhood education services raises some fundamental questions about what we are trying to achieve for students, and how best to do that. Like other countries, what New Zealand wants from its education system has expanded. Education is seen as key to national, as well as individual, wellbeing and productivity. Schools are asked to raise the ‘floor’ of educational achievement, to increase the numbers of high achievers and also deepen the nature of educational achievement: to grow students’ soft skills (aka Key Competencies) so they can contribute well to society and the economy. But at the same time, public money is under increasing pressure. No public education system is entirely adequately funded in terms of what we expect of it, even in countries which have more of a welfare state approach than New Zealand now has. So New Zealand is no exception when it comes to policy interest in seeing how public money can be used more effectively and efficiently in relation to student outcomes and how best to provide for students with the highest level of needs. And we’re no exception either, when it comes to the real challenges of finding ways to do this that are robust, and that are likely to make a tangible positive difference to the opportunities school leaders can provide. In this article I want to touch on a few fundamental points around the current funding review. What can we do to get more efficiency? Efficiency means getting more outcomes for the same or reduced cost. Bear in mind that student outcomes from their time in school reflect some complex interactions over time, as portrayed here. Interactions behind student outcomes
What are the drivers of the costs of our schools, and what could we change? Students – we can’t change who comes through the doors in a public system ■■ Property – we could change some aspects here ■■
Utilities – can the system as a whole get cheaper costs for schools? ■■ ICT – can the system as a whole get cheaper costs for schools? ■■ Staffing – cutting numbers is unlikely to achieve system goals, given the current workloads of teachers and school leaders and growing expectations But we can think about • working on making teaching-learning processes more effective • whether existing policy frameworks create extra work for teaching staff that impede more effective teaching-learning processes (e.g., having a secondary qualification (NCEA) with 3 levels – unlike any other country) • ensuring school leaders have adequate preparation and ongoing development • reducing competition between schools • maintaining and deepening school leaders’ and teachers’ motivation, especially in our most demanding schools. ■■
Thinking well and creatively about making more of what we have isn’t just about working out a funding formula for schools. It’s about seeing how the system as a whole works to support strong and engaging learning. You can’t just think of school resourcing in terms of per-student amounts. You also have to think about the infrastructure schools need to provide this. Sometimes it’s visible – can you access really good professional learning or advice when you need it, for the things you are working on? Sometimes it’s invisible – what are the policy settings that frame your priorities and time use? Our education would not be able to deliver the outcomes we expect if we simply put all the education money into individual schools, or attached it to individual students. Measuring efficiency Education poses real challenges when it comes to working out the relationship between spending and outcomes, and the effectiveness of resource use. The evidence base around ‘what works’ is not a filled-in map, giving reliable directions to guaranteed strategies or slot-in lessons for given student challenges. No other country can offer us a proven methodology of resource allocation that improves both the efficiency and effectiveness of public education, ensuring improved outcomes. How we’re going to get gains in outcomes, through using the prime resources of educator and student time more effectively, will owe a lot to our system-wide commitment to the habitual use of inquiry spirals. We’ll also need much more sharing of what we learn, and system-wide coherence so leaders can focus well on this work. Funding changes that can make a real difference aren’t just about changing funding formulae.
N Z Principal | N o v e m b e r 2 0 16
Addressing disadvantage None of the outcomes we seek for education as a whole can be gained if we don’t address disadvantage. There is strong evidence that students from poor homes benefit from additional government funding for their schools. One recent study that was able to track students into adulthood in one U.S. state found that increased funding overall benefited these students substantially in terms of school completion, higher earnings, and reduction in adult poverty.1 Increasing the amount of student funding by 25 per cent over the 12 years of their schooling “eliminates attainment gaps between children from low- and high-income families.” What such an increase in funding needs to be to close the attainment gaps would be different in each country, depending on what was provided before, and what was done with the increased funding. In this case, it went mainly on staffing, and longer instructional time. If we are serious about addressing disadvantage, we need to analyse carefully what margin needs to be provided above the universal per-student amount to provide gains, matching that with additional resourcing for these students and their teachers and schools in the infrastructure around them. Decile funding was originally intended to target the schools serving the most disadvantaged students. It was stretched beyond this purpose to spread funding over more schools, in the process leading to the labelling which has now undermined it and sharpened some of the social segregation between schools. It has only covered some additional to operational funding and not additional staffing (unlike a similar approach in the Netherlands). Decile funding has been characterised as a ‘blunt instrument’, largely because it uses Census data, which may not reflect the
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current social situation and is not precise for each individual. It has the advantage of being low-cost to operate. Finer targeting can cost more, and can be less accurate, especially if parents are asked to provide information on their income or education levels. England, for example, has the Pupil Premium, whose purpose is to close achievement gaps between advantaged and disadvantaged students. It provides a loading of 31 per cent on the per-student funding for primary schools and some for area deprivation. Any school can get the Pupil Premium for students for whom they can supply evidence that the student is either ‘looked after’ (in foster care with the local authority) or receiving free school meals. But parents need to apply for Free School Meals, and an estimated 11 per cent of those who were eligible were not doing so, a figure that is thought to be increasing. Australia has had similar difficulty getting accurate information from parents on their own qualifications, and occupations, particularly for schools serving low-income areas.2 That results in less funding for those schools. Systems that provide a higher amount of per-student-funding (often called ‘weighted student funding’) to counter disadvantage usually prioritise poverty, low parental education levels, foster children, the country’s language as a second language or immigrants from poor countries. They also provide additional funding where there is a concentration of students who fit the criteria. In New Zealand, we need to think of two categories of additional need that warrant sufficient additional funding to make a difference to student outcomes. As with other countries, there is need in the form of deprivation – poverty, stability of housing, relationships (e.g, being in a foster home, having jailed parents). There is also higher need: students with special needs, revitalisation of te reo Māori and culture, English as an additional language, and the retention of Pacific languages. There is no single measure for all these needs that could be used to weight per-student funding. Yet multidimensional measures raise their own issues of how you weight each contributing need. Careful modelling of some different measures of student need in relation to existing provision, with a range of school sizes and contexts are essential. We need to know what difference any new measures might make and whether there are any additional administrative costs to the new measures and their application that would mean reductions for the funds available for actual learning and the infrastructure that supports it. It is good to see that decision points about whether to proceed are built into the current outline of the review of educational funding systems. These need to be real decision points, real times to check the substance of the proposed changes against their logic. We need all the layers of our system to make a meaningful contribution to the design of the measures and the testing and for the sector to be involved in discussion of the results to ensure that any changes will provide a better ground for improving educational outcomes. This is all the more important given that this fundamental and highly ambitious review is not increasing the overall resourcing for education.
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References 1 Jackson, C.K., Johnson, R.C., & Persico, C. (2015). www.nber.org/papers/w20847 2 Cobbold, T. (2010). Issues in using Enrolment Data to Measure the Socio-Economic Status of Schools. SOS Policy Brief. www.savourschools.com.au.
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