Variations in Hardship Amounts

The most common complaint about hardship anomalies involved many cases in which students in similar circumstances got quite different grants. NZUSA suspected for a long time that the Department of Education worked on the basis that there was a fixed budget for its hardship expenditure and adjusted its allocations throught the year accordingly. That is, the Department amended its criteria. These suspicions were reinforced by figures on hardship awards announced in Parliament, on 8 August 1980, by the then Acting Minister of Education David Thompson.

Tables Two and Three provide some insight into this trend by looking at percentage weightings.

Given the trend of smaller awards as the year progressed it is not surprising that the major complaint about the SHG, apart from the delays and associated uncertainties, has been the number of anomalies. Amending the application of criteria simply in order to spend less can only create anomalies; they cannot be avoided.