Thirteen Otago and Southland schools were found to be in serious financial difficulty last year, a recently released Controller and Auditor-general report has found. The report said schools in financial difficulty were those with a “working capital deficit”, which meant last year the affected schools needed to pay out more funds in the following 12 months than they had available. The report said another sign of potential financial difficulty was when a school had an overdraft or low levels of available cash. The number of schools in financial difficulty remains about the same each year (about 40 nationwide), but it is not always the same schools. Of those schools identified in the 2017 report, 27 are no longer considered to be in financial difficulty.

Source: Otago Daily Times November 28, 2019 15:33 UTC