Key Findings, Data, Statistics and Publications

School funding data are publicly available on Education Counts. Data can be accessed via the following links.

Statistics

Data are generally made available as simple spreadsheets, but, interactive dashboards may be available and /or pivot tables to allow bespoke tables to be created by users.

Indicators

Established measures used to determin how well a result has been achieved in a particluar area of interest. For example, the rate of formal school qualifications helps quantify whether students are succeeding at school. There is no indicator on funding of schools per se, but, there is one on school financial performance.

Find a School

An online tool where you can search for a particular school in New Zealand and find its profile, including contact details. You can also access student population, student engagement, student achievement and funding data for the school.

Know Your Region

An online tool where you can find education data for different regions or territorial authority. Using this tool you can access data on student population, student engagement, student achievement and school funding.

Monitoring Publications

Significant monitoring publications are produced each year. These tend to focus on specific education sector, priority population group, and/or an education strategy related tyo one of these sectors or groups. Key measures such as school funding are used in these publications.

Why is the Ministry collecting this data

Funding compulsory education is one of the major responsibilities of the government. The majority of government funding in the schooling sector is delivered to education institutions.  School funding data are core information required for monitoring the performance of the schooling sector. The Ministry uses financial information:

• to monitor the results of the New Zealand education system
• to support policy analysis
• for national and international reporting

School funding data are also used for general research and statistics, in accordance with the Privacy Act 2020. This may include linking school funding with data and other student data, for example for research on the correlation between funding and achievement. Care is taken that no individual can ever be identified from the published analysis.

The Measures

The Ministry provides funding for schools by way of operational funding, salary funding for teachers, and property funding. In additional schools receive various forms of 'in-kind' resourcing from the government, including software licensing, laptops for principals, other ICT support and professional development.

The Data Source

Operational funding is the financial resources received by schools from the Government for running the day to day operations of schools. Salary funding is defined as gross salaries pain by the government to teachers employed in schools. Property funding is the funding spent on maintaining and expanding school property.

State and state-integrated schools get funding from all three sources, while private schools only receive School Operations funding.

Other school funding sources

Schools can raise money themselves, and in specific circumstances charge fees and/or seek donations. For example, proprietors of state-integrated schools and kura can charge attendance dues. Schools can ask parents and whānau to pay for goods and services they provide that are optional (eg pens and lunches) but it is up to families/whānau to decide whether to buy them from the school kura or elsewhere.

Decile 1-7 state and state integrated schools and kura can receive additional funding of $150.00 (excl GST) per student for that year in exchange for not seeking donations from parents (except for overnight camps). Schools that do not opt in to this donation scheme, including decile 8-10 schools can still ask parents for a donation, but payment cannot be compelled or enforced. Schools that have entered the donation scehme are identified on Find a Schools Directory: