School heads seek funding review

The Principals Federation has backed calls for the Government to review schools' funding after revelations that schools are having to fundraise to maintain educational standards.

Last week, the School Trustees Association released findings of a study of 18 effectively performing schools. It found that they could not maintain educational standards on Government funding alone - they had to fundraise.

Now, the principals have backed that finding.

"Principals and boards have consistently stated that they do not have enough money to run their schools," the federation says in its paper "Resourcing - The Inadequacy of the Operations Grant".

The paper quotes a 2002 report to the Minister of Education showing that in primary schools, of a total funding of $4204 per student, $439 came from local funds and investments.

In secondary schools, of a total of $6010 per student, $1007, or nearly 17 per cent, came from within the community.

Federation president Kelvin Squire said Education Minister Trevor Mallard had to commission a review of schools' resourcing.

He said principals believed operations grant funding levels weren't sufficient with the growing requirements of information technology.

"It is time for the minister to accept that there are discrepancies, inequities and shortfalls.

"Grasp the nettle of responsibility and order an investigation into the whole area of school resourcing," Mr Squire said.

In its resourcing paper, the federation said all types of school were inadequately funded and increasingly reliant on fundraising.

The advent of information technology had seen a change from 15 years ago, when schools typically had one phone line, a banda spirit duplicator, no fax machines and few computers, to the present, where IT was a major part of schools.

This meant inflation-adjusted operation grants had failed to effectively keep pace with schools' needs.

"It is the Principals Federation's contention that the already under-resourced schools are falling even further behind, and those with foreign fee-payers or access to other local funds are being artificially subsidised."

A spokeswoman for Mr Mallard said he had not yet seen the paper.

- NZPA