The decile ranking system was introduced in New Zealand 20 years ago as a mean of measuring the level of funding that New Zealand schools would receive from the government operational grant. The decile system uses the socio-economic backgrounds of a portion of children in each school, and uses this to rank the schools accordingly. Decile 1 schools (the lowest rank) receive a substantially larger amount of funding when compared to decile 10 (highest ranked) schools, who receive little to no funding at all.

As high school students ourselves, we strongly believe that this system is much too blunt and inaccurate as it is a generalization of schools, and rather unfair to assume that all lower decile schools contain poor students and higher decile schools contain rich students as sometimes, that is far from the case.

In this petition, we are genuinely hoping to replace this inaccurate ranking system and replace it with a system that retracts more information from every school and works to benefit the school and students as a whole. We hope you will help us in our petition and reshape the New Zealand education system for the benefit of all New Zealand residents.