Education data ‘fail to reflect diverse identities of NZ students’

Government data collection methods may be distorting New Zealand’s education policy and funding decisions because they do not allow people to register multiple ethnic groups, a Massey University study has found.

Although government statistics show that a quarter of young people in NZ identify with more than one ethnicity, Ministry of Education data collection allows only one group to be recorded per person.

Philippa Butler, a Massey research officer, looked at the system as part of a social anthropology PhD thesis on multiple cultural identities.