Purpose
Background
The Social Workers in Schools (SWiS) programme began in 1999. It was expanded in 2000 and 2001 into 170 schools, and again between 2005 and 2007 to school clusters where at least 60 percent of students were in decile 1–3 schools (taking the number to about 300 schools).
In 2012/13, the service was extended to all schools and kura that were decile 1–3 at the time, covering school years 1–8. This expansion increased the number of schools and kura served from 300 to 700.
There are some schools in higher deciles that receive SWiS services. This is because they were in deciles 1–3 when the service was rolled out, and have continued to receive it.
Methodology
We estimated the impact of SWiS on outcomes for students by looking at the major expansion of SWiS that occurred in 2012-13. We examined whether, for students enrolled in the schools and kura that newly received SWiS, there were reductions in:
stand-downs and suspensions from school
care and protection notifications to Child, Youth and Family (CYF)
Police apprehensions for alleged offending.
These are three outcomes for students able to be measured using linked and de-identified administrative data in the Statistics New Zealand Integrated Data Infrastructure (the IDI).
We use a ‘Difference-in-Differences’ approach to estimate the impact the 2012-13 expansion of SWiS had on students’ outcomes, after controlling for other factors. This involves comparing students in schools and kura that were the decile 1-3 schools newly served by SWiS as a result of the expansion with students in two groups of comparison
schools and kura:
schools that had SWiS already, before the expansion (mainly decile 1-3 schools)
decile 4-5 schools that had never received SWiS.
Researchers were from:
- Ministry of Social Development
- Oranga Tamariki—Ministry for Children
- Motu Economic & Public Policy Research
- Massey University.
Key Results
The research looked at the impact of SWiS on:
- stand-downs and suspensions from school
- care and protection notifications
- Police apprehensions for alleged offending.
The research found encouraging results for some student groups that may be attributable to SWiS.
For example, Māori boys enrolled in SWiS base schools showed a drop in rates of police apprehensions compared to Māori boys in schools that did not get SWiS in the expansion.
For Pacific students there were lower rates of care and protection notifications to Child, Youth and Family (the predecessor to Oranga Tamariki).