Roll Review Application Suggestions for Formal Cohort Entry Schools

Presuming that your provisional staffing might not staff you at the same level as non-cohort entry schools I offer a modified Staffing Roll Review form to send to MOE Resourcing if useful for your circumstances.  Ignore the 5% requirement, remember to include MMI numbers and include SMS lists of names, ages and school enrolment dates for those you seek to have included in your provisional staffing for 2022.

Do you need to do this?

Here are two ways of checking whether the current staffing entitlement for your cohort entry school includes all pupils who would likely have been enrolled if mid-term cohort entry dates had been 1 March and 1 July.

1. Using this year’s staffing as a test, enter the current 2021 provisional staffing roll numbers, including the Y1 Adjustment, in the MOE staffing calculator and note the Total Roll Based Staffing generated.
Now using the “Edit Roll Input Data” button, increase the Regular Student numbers at Y1, Y1 Adj and Y2 by the number of pupils identified as enrolling on 15 March this year who –

• turned 5 from 9 Feb to 1 March inclusive (add these to the Y1 roll on the staffing calculator)
• are 11/12ths of the Y1 identification above (Round up to nearest whole number and add to Y1 Adj)

And those identified as enrolling on 30 August this year who -

• turned 5 from 8^th June to 1 July inclusive (add these to the Y2 roll on the staffing calculator)

Calculate staffing again, making sure you have also completed the Maori Medium Index row (MMI) if any of these pupils are Level 1 or 2 MMI.  Any improvement in total Roll based staffing suggests how much staffing improvement might have occurred for this year to gain parity with non-cohort entry schools had you been able to supply it last September.

2. Consider the “cost” of just one 5 yr old not being enrolled on 1 March because of cohort entry dates:

Initial prediction of next year’s year 1 roll is established using the Y1 roll from this year’s Y1 roll.  Then, because the Y1 Adjustment prediction uses the Y1 roll above, the one child Y1 not enrolled on 1 March escalates to 2 children because of the y1 adjustment you miss out on for that child.
Two Y1 pupils not counted out of 15 (1:15 ratio for Y1 staffing) is 2/15ths of a teacher lost.
Turning that into dollars using the MOE overuse rate means 2/15ths of $80500, or $10000+ worth of staffing that non cohort schools do not have to absorb.
Even acknowledging that you will minimize the overuse cost of cohort entry using your cheapest salary, let's say $65000, the FTTE loss will still equate to well over $8000 per child.

Knowing that the initial September funding advice notice also uses the provisional staffing roll total, including the Y1 adjustment, to generate initial per pupil funding (about $800 per pupil) and other formula based funding levels, the loss of just 1 Y1 pupil means the loss of $1600+ in funding to put alongside the ftte loss, so likely $10000.00+ disparity per child when compared with non-cohort schools.

For MACS Schools (roll less than 176) cohort entry might be a bit more confronting.  If cohort entry results in you provisional roll landing on a multiple of 25, you will be about 0.6 Fttes per fortnight worse off (say $39000+ at $65000 rate) than if you had been a non-cohort entry school with just one more pupil counted.

Will your informing MOE of the above via the Suggested Roll Review process be favourably received?

I am encouraged by this statement that can be found on the Cohort Entry section of the MOE website (And taking a bit of poetic licence by assuming “funded” means both Operations Grant funding and FTTE funding:
“The Ministry will ensure that cohort entry schools are funded appropriately equal to other state and state-integrated schools.”

Gavin Price  NZPF Life Member  027 607 6220  gavin.price@xtra.co.nz    www.bankingstaffing.co.nz