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What is EQI?

EQI — the Equity Index — replaced school decile in January 2023. It is the Ministry of Education's measure of the socio-economic barriers a school's students face, and it determines how much equity funding a school receives.

How EQI is calculated

For every student enrolled at a school, the Ministry looks at 37 anonymised factors drawn from administrative data (IRD, MSD, Stats NZ, Corrections, Justice). These cover the student, their parents and the extended whānau over up to 17 years.

Each student gets an individual score. The school's EQI is the average of its current students' scores.

Scores run from 344 (lowest barriers) to 569 (highest barriers). A higher number means students face more socio-economic challenges; a lower number means fewer.

What EQI measures — and what it doesn't

EQI measures: the average socio-economic barriers students at this school face, today.

EQI does NOT measure:

  • School quality, teaching quality or learning outcomes
  • How "good" a school is
  • The achievement of any individual student
  • The school's culture, leadership or values

How decile differs from EQI

The old decile system put each school into one of 10 bands based on the neighbourhoods its students came from. EQI uses individual student-level data, not census-mesh-block proxies — making it both more accurate and more resistant to gaming (e.g. a school whose roll mostly comes from outside its zone).

How to use EQI as a parent

EQI tells you about the community the school serves, not whether it's a good school. To judge teaching, look at:

  • The school's most recent ERO report (we link these on every school page)
  • The school's audited annual financials (stable surpluses, no audit qualifications)
  • Leadership stability (frequent principal changes are a yellow flag)
  • Whether a Statutory Manager or Commissioner has been appointed in the past 5 years
  • Verified parent reviews and recent media coverage

Source

EQI methodology is published by the Ministry of Education at education.govt.nz. Each school's EQI is updated annually and we surface the latest figure on every school page.