Socioeconomic decile

In the New Zealand education system, decile was a key measure of socioeconomic status used to target funding and support schools. In academic contexts the full term "socioeconomic decile" or "socioeconomic decile band" was used.

A school's decile indicated the extent to which the school draws its students from low socioeconomic communities. Decile 1 schools were the 10% of schools with the highest proportion of students from low socio-economic communities.

This system was implemented in 1995 and later replaced by the Equity index in January 2023.