Who decides which students get which resources?
Deciding which students get which resources and services requires decision-makers to:
- consider a student’s circumstances holistically; this requires good information about a student’s needs and their environment, and should include their family and teachers
- have good information about what type of services and support will best help a student to learn
- manage the provision of services such as specialist teaching, physiotherapy and teachers’ aide time
- work within the funding that is available
- manage variability in student needs. Students’ needs often vary considerably
- be administratively efficient
- be accountable for supporting students to achieve good outcomes and for using funding wiselyxv.
The options for who should be the decision-maker range from parents and caregivers at one end to central government at the other.
Making decisions about resources: spectrum of options
|
Parents and caregivers |
School |
Regional/District body or school cluster |
Central Government |
| Having good information about a student's needs. |
Are very close to students and their individual needs. |
Are very close to students and their learning needs. |
Information will be based on personal knowledge about the student and paper-based information. |
Information will largely be paper-based, making decisions about student needs less precise. |
| Having good information about the services and supports that are needed for learning. |
May find it difficult to access specialist knowledge. |
Depends on school's experience with students with special education needs. |
Have ready access to knowledge, experience and best practice evidence about what works to support learning. |
Have ready access to theory, research and best practice evidence about what works to support learning. |
| Provide services. |
May find it difficult and time consuming to employ or contract with service providers and to meet legal obligations. |
Can readily employ service providers, but one school may have very few students with special education needs making employing different specialists and specialist teachers difficult and time consuming. |
Can readily employ service providers and realise economies of scale. |
Can readily employ service providers, but is distant from the service needs of individual students and risks diseconomies of scale. |
| Managing funding. |
Would manage funding for their child only, but there is a risk that funding would not match needs exactly. |
If a school has very few students it is unlikely that a funding pool would be large enough to manage the variability in student needs. |
Would have a pool of funding for a group of students, making it easier to manage the variability in student needs. |
Would have a pool of funding for a group of students, making it easier to manage the variability in student needs. |
| Accountability for outcomes and funding. |
Potentially unclear if there isn’t good access to professional information about education and services and support. |
Accountability is clear and when resourcing decisions are made by schools they have strong ownership of students with special education needs. |
Accountability is clear, but need to make sure that the decision-maker works in partnership with schools and families and whānau. |
Accountability should be clear, but good accountability arrangements are needed to ensure there is ownership of students by schools as decisionmaking is distant from them. Information about students will also be less personalised. |
Currently, there is a mixed model for decision-making. In general, the higher a student’s needs, the closer to central government the decisions about access to resources are made. Decisions about services and support for students with moderate needs are made locally.
At the regional or district level the decision-maker is often the Ministry of Education’s special education district staff, especially for speech-language therapy and behaviour services. It may also be a lead school on behalf of a school cluster.
For students verified to receive support from the ORRS programmes there are two steps to the decision-making process. Firstly, central government (the Ministry of Education) decides who is eligible for ORRS resources through a process known as verification. Secondly, a local fundholder decides the services and support provided to eligible students. This model means that there is equity in who gets resources across the country and there is the ability to respond to individual student needs at the local level. The decision-making process is shown below.
ORRS decision-making process
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The first step of the process, the verification decision, is critical. It aims to ensure that all applicants are considered equally and fairly by people specialised in special education. It also aims to keep administration costs low. We are aware, however, that the verification process and the verification criteria are of concern to some people and are interested in your feedback on how well the process works and on extending the current ORRS criteria. Your feedback will be important to the Government deciding on how to get the most from the additional $18 million per year that it has made available for students with the highest needs. The current ORRS verification criteria are listed in the appendices.
The second step of the decision-making process is carried out by fundholders. Fundholders decide on the services and support for individual students. At the moment fundholders are either individual schools, a lead school for a school cluster or the Ministry of Education’s special education district offices.
Each fundholder is responsible for at least 20 ORRS-funded students. Some fundholders, for example special schools or the Ministry of Education, are responsible for many more than 20 studentsxvi.
At present only the Ministry and schools are accredited as fundholders. We are interested in your views about whether non-government organisations, private organisations, families/whānau or other groups could be fundholders.
Question 4
What arrangements for funding, decision-making, verification, and fundholding should we have?