School choice interactive: Students, parents cross cities in decile race

Thousands of kids are criss-crossing our big cities to get into the wealthier schools of their choice - and continuing a long trend of abandoning the lower-decile schools in their own neighbourhoods, a new NZHerald interactive tool shows.

Drawn from Ministry of Education data from 2020 obtained under the Official Information Act, the Herald's new tool lets you see where people in your neighbourhood are sending their kids; or search for almost any school - primary, secondary, private or state-integrated - to see where its students live.

You can see how the interactive works in the video above. The full interactive tool is available on NZ Herald premium here.

The maps starkly illustrate what researchers call "decile drift" - that parents seek out higher decile schools than the ones in their own neighbourhood, especially at secondary level, leading to schools in poorer areas shrinking. In many schools, that's led to increasing segregation along class and racial lines.

Yet the tool also shows that while some schools are not seen as desirable by people who live locally, kids from all over Auckland will still flock there from another, even less popular school - almost always further down the decile ladder.

That's despite extensive research showing school decile is not an indicator of quality - in fact lower decile schools frequently out-perform their higher-decile counterparts, once non-school factors are accounted for.

So if parents aren't gaining educational advantages for their children - why are they really avoiding those lower decile schools?

The decile system was created to help fund equity, not as a label of achievement or teaching quality. It's now considered an outdated tool which is at best a blunt indicator of poverty or disadvantage at a school. But a report by former Edgewater College principal Allan Vester found deciles are still used as a "synonym for quality", with high deciles used by real estate agents as a marketing tool for selling houses, and by schools as a drawcard to enrol more kids.

Vester also found a clear pattern that school size was related to decile - but it wasn't the absolute decile that was most important. Instead, the key predictor of parent's school choice was getting away from the lowest decile school in their area. What was considered a low decile in one area may be high in another.

Ministry of Education roll return data for 2020 shows roughly twice as many kids now attend the highest decile schools as attend the lowest deciles. As low decile school rolls have fallen, roll-based funding has evaporated, leading to dilapidated classrooms and high staff turnover.

High decile schools can also draw on community resources to offer far more extracurricular activities, further stacking the deck against shrinking schools where the options on offer are limited. And as the Herald's data clearly shows, kids who live next door to each other scatter across the city as they get older, increasing transport congestion and weakening bonds with their own communities.