Think of a number, then multiply by four.

Family First have collected some data from the Ministry of Education on ‘fees or donations’ to NZ state schools. You can read the Herald story, or just get the press release directly, without the light editing the newspaper provides.

The figure of $250 million per year is pretty impressive. NZ has about 750,000 children in school  (EducationCounts, school roll returns), so that’s maybe $330 per child, which is quite a bit for free education.

Unfortunately, Family First thought that wasn’t a big enough number and decided it would look better as a total over four years of about a billion dollars.  There’s obviously nothing special about four years here: school donations have been an issue for much longer than that, there wasn’t a big change in laws or policies four years ago, and no-one plans budgets over four year blocks, not schools, not government, not families.  It’s bad enough when reports don’t provide any context for numbers, without going out of their way to remove it. Presumably if Family First had been able to get ten years of data (and inflation-adjust it), we would see a headline total of $2.5 billion.

Interestingly, one of the paragraphs from the press release that didn’t make it into the story said that the Ministry couldn’t provide information on the proportion of parents who actually paid the donations.  This is interesting because the Herald has collected information of this sort itself in the past, as reported in this story and the Wikipedia article. As you might expect, the proportion paying was lower in the low-decile schools, but even in the high-decile schools there were quite a few who didn’t pay.