School deciles are gone. Meet the Equity Index.

For nearly thirty years, New Zealand parents judged schools by a single number out of ten, then repeated it at dinner parties as though it meant something. In January 2023 the government quietly retired the decile and handed everyone a fresh number to misunderstand: the Equity Index. It runs from 344 to 569, it counts the opposite way to deciles, and a higher score means the school's families face more hurdles, not fewer. We have matched the Equity Index for every school to the suburb it sits in, so you can stop asking what decile it is and start being confused by something current. And it is properly current. Where the old decile could sit unchanged for the better part of a decade, the Equity Index is recalculated every single year.

What the number means, and what it doesn't

The decile system had one fatal flaw beyond being blunt: people read it as a report card. A decile 10 school was assumed excellent and a decile 1 school assumed otherwise, when all the number ever measured was the wealth of the surrounding community. The Equity Index makes the same measurement with more precision. It is built from 37 socio-economic factors pulled from anonymised Stats NZ data, things like parents' education, benefit history, time in the justice system, and how often a child has changed schools, averaged across the school's roll over three years. The Ministry sorts schools into seven bands, from "fewest barriers" up to "most," with the national average sitting at 463. What it does not do, and the Ministry says this in writing, is grade the school. It says nothing about the teaching, the principal, or whether your kid will thrive. Read it as a map of need rather than a league table and you will read it correctly. Most people will not, which is why we keep saying it.

Why two schools with the same old decile can sit miles apart

The whole case for the change fits in a single comparison. Under the old system, Macleans College and Whangaparāoa College were both decile 9, which implied they served much the same kind of community. When the Equity Index first landed, Macleans came in at 390 and Whangaparāoa at 463, a gap of 73 points and the better part of a band. Same decile, genuinely different cohorts. That is the upgrade in one example: the decile was a wide net cast twice a decade, the Equity Index is a finer one cast every year. It will not be perfect, no single number is, but it is a lot harder to hide behind.

Where the barriers actually are

Zoom out to the regions and the map is sobering rather than surprising. On the first national calculation, schools in Te Tai Tokerau, Northland carried the highest average Equity Index at 506, followed by Tairāwhiti at 491 and the Bay of Plenty at 489. Auckland and Canterbury sat lowest at 444. Those averages flatten enormous street-to-street variation, so a wealthy suburb and a struggling one inside the same city can be a hundred points apart. The reason the regional picture matters is simple: the funding follows the number. The higher the barriers, the more equity money the school receives, which is the entire point of building the thing.

Follow the money, and the donations

Here is where it gets pointed. When the Equity Index replaced deciles, the government added $75 million, a 50 percent boost to the equity pool, and around 90 percent of schools came out ahead. Northland gained the most, roughly $223 extra per pupil. About 250 schools went backwards, their cuts phased in at 5 percent a year, and awkwardly, several of those were in lower-income parts of South Auckland, which made for a complicated headline about a system designed to do the opposite.

The sharper inequality is the part nobody raises at the school gala. Schools at or above an Equity Index of around 431 can take a government payment in exchange for not asking parents for donations. Schools below that line, the wealthier ones, are free to keep asking, and they do. An RNZ survey found those schools collected about $26 million in donations in a single year, roughly $280 a student, almost double what the government scheme pays the schools that opt in. So the model that funds need most generously also lets the comfortable top themselves up hardest. Both things are true at once, which is the running theme of this entire site.

Methodology

The Equity Index is calculated by Stats NZ from 37 anonymised variables in its Integrated Data Infrastructure, grouped into four categories and averaged across a school's students over three years. It is recalculated annually and published each September. It applies to state and state-integrated schools and kura, not private schools, and it is a funding measure, not a quality one. We match each school to its suburb by address and show the most recent published figure.