Dialogue: Parents cop too big a burden in helping to fund schools

Our education system has come to rely too heavily on the direct and unfair extraction of money from parents, writes STUART MIDDLETON*.

Tales about school fees herald the start of each new school year. Cash registers ring as loudly as the school bell, it seems.

Parents have a right to support their children through their schooling in whatever way they wish.

Some pick up a good part of the bill by sending them to independent schools. Others generously give cash to the state or integrated school which their children attend. Others do what they can.

The issue here is not that this happens. It has been going on for as long as schools have been around. The issues are ostensibly the scale of the "compulsory donation" and the continuing practice of charging for instruction through a scale of "subject fees".

A low-decile secondary school of 1000 students setting an annual "fee" of $50 a family - and this is the level that is realistic - can expect in a good year to collect about $35,000. A high-decile school of the same size, with an annual "donation" of $500, will collect about $500,000.

So the amounts involved are significant indeed in some schools.

The latest survey of school income, now several years out of date, revealed that 11 per cent of total school income was derived from the local community.

With many low-decile schools collecting something below 1 to 2 per cent, it follows that a national average of 11 per cent is achieved only by other schools getting perhaps as much as 20 per cent of their income from their communities.

There is, therefore, probably some merit in their claims that they need to have these funds. They have got used to having this income. But are they needed to provide basic instruction?

If so, the situation looks bleak for schools that have no access to such levels of community support.

Add to this the practice of subject fees. I found, as the principal of a low-decile secondary school, that it was simply not possible to levy students for subjects, even those which involved significant materials costs. Few could pay and distinctions between them and those who could not were invidious and illegal.

But a bottle of chemicals for a low-decile science class costs the same as a bottle of chemicals for a high-decile science class. Schools pay for computers, library books, sports equipment, and all the things schools need to do their job, at much the same level, regardless of income.

Fixed costs are just that - fixed. What is variable in school funding is the amount of financial support communities are able to be encouraged to give.

The charge is often made that the Government treats low-decile schools generously. Recently Bill English claimed that low-decile schools were "cash rich".

The facts suggest otherwise. Only 4 per cent of Government funding of schools in New Zealand is decile-related. Fully 96 per cent of funding is not in any way related to the wealth of the communities with which schools work.

So there is no comfort in thinking that low-decile schools are well treated. They most certainly are not and they have exactly the same pressures for funding as high-decile schools. They also do not have a wealthy community to go to for help.

It doesn't just stop at school donations and subject fees. School camps, sports clothing and equipment, field trips, musical instruments, and all those additional things that make a school programme interesting and exciting can be charged to parents in some schools but not in others.

Where the costs of such things cannot be shifted on to the community, schools have the choice of paying for them out of government funds or seeing their students miss out.

Parents know that sending children to school is expensive and that the demands for cash for this, that and the other thing don't ease much as the year progresses.

All of this paints a picture, not of schools and teachers that are exploiting their communities, but of a national education system that has come to rely too heavily on direct contributions of cash from parents and caregivers to keep the enterprise going.

This black education economy is unfair to everybody. It is unfair to the communities that can afford to support their children through direct contributions in addition to the indirect support of education through taxation. It is unfair to those communities that cannot afford to give cash to schools and must instead see gaps between different communities and schools increase.

It is time for the nation to reassess the value of education and its schools which lay the foundation for it. We have had enough of this private gain nonsense.

Education is a public good and any mature economy would ensure that it is funded equitably to adequate levels.

The value of education far outweighs any cost.

* Stuart Middleton, the general manager of academic services at the Auckland College of Education, chairs the City of Manukau Education Trust.