Forecasting Enrolments in K-12 Education

Forecasting enrollments in K-12 education is a pivotal task for school business officials. This process is integral to the strategic planning and operational efficiency of school districts, especially in jurisdictions like North America where student population directly influences funding. An accurate projection of student enrollments is essential for budget planning, facilities management, and resource allocation.

The Importance of Enrollment Forecasting

Accurate forecasting of student enrollments plays a crucial role in various aspects of school district management. It allows for precise budgeting, ensuring that funds are effectively allocated to meet educational needs. Additionally, it aids in facilities planning, helping to ensure that adequate space and resources are available for the student body. Understanding enrollment trends also facilitates proactive management of space requirements, allowing districts to make well-informed decisions regarding capital funding and catchment area adjustments. Early identification of potential space issues due to enrollment changes allows more time for community engagement and the development of flexible solutions that cater to family needs.

Methods used to forecast enrolments

There are multiple ways that people can use to try and forecast their enrolments:

1. Student Progression Ratios: The largest factor that will impact future enrolments is the number of students that are currently enrolled and their natural progression through the grades in the future. Commonly referred to as the Survival-Cohort ratio, utilizing the trends of how students progress through the grades at each school is a simple but very effective way to forecast future populations.
2. Housing Generation Rates: Depending on how granular census and subdivision planning data is in your local jurisdiction, the amount of students that come from an area compared to the number of households can be an effective tool to forecast the impact on enrolments of new subdivisions and housing starts in the community.
3. Municipal growth forecasts: Most municipalities forecast their estimated future growth, which can be utilized in conjunction with other methods to determine the overall expected trend for students numbers.
4. Birth rates: Kindergarten is the most difficult grade to forecast as the children have not yet been enrolled with the School District. Trends in birth rates this year can provide a trend of where kindergarten numbers will trend 5 years later.

Using Student Progression Ratios as the base to forecast in the short and medium term

Forecasting can be viewed as a daunting process, however the progression of students from one grade to the next represents a very significant predictor that can be used to project enrolments forward. The ratio of how the population of a grade relates to the previous grade the year before is a simple ratio that in the short and medium term can create simple but accurate forecasts.  

This simplified process of forecasting enrollments begins with gathering historical enrollment data from each school in the district. Once the data is collected, the next step involves analyzing the movement of students from grade to grade. This is done by calculating the ratio of student progression from one grade to the next. For instance, to understand the progression from kindergarten to grade 1, divide the number of grade 1 students in a given year by the kindergarten enrollments from the previous year. This calculation is repeated for each grade and for each year in the data set.

After calculating these ratios, the next step is to determine the average progression ratio for each grade. This average ratio, which represents the average progression ratio for a certain amount of years in the past, acts as a multiplier to project future enrollments based on your current enrolments. This provides a historical perspective on how enrollments have evolved over time and serves as a baseline for future projections. How many years of ratios to use in your average depends on the trends that are occurring at the school and whether the school is rapidly declining, growing or has stable enrolments.

In addition to movement within a school, it's crucial to consider the progression to feeder schools. Analyzing how enrollments from feeder schools contribute to the student population in subsequent grades provides additional insight into the number of students that will be joining the school from other schools. This involves dividing the enrollments in a grade by the total number of students in the corresponding grade in the feeder schools from the previous year.

Using demographic and geographic factors to project kindergarten enrolments and adjust long-term projections

Kindergarten enrolments, which do not have a feeder grade to apply a ratio to, is a group that must have additional considerations. Comparing birth rate information for your region 5 years ago with your current kindergarten enrolments and projecting this trend forward can provide some insights. Personally, I have used the overall growth trends for the school division, while considering the trend in birth rates to project future kindergarten enrolments.

When using the Survival-Cohort ratio to project enrollment forward, it is important when projecting out into longer term projections to also adjust based on specific community trends. Factors such as local migration patterns, housing starts, economic growth or decline, and birth rates can significantly influence student populations over the medium and long-term. Therefore, it's imperative to adjust the historical progression ratios based on these unique community dynamics to enhance the accuracy of the forecasts.

Often times, municipalities and other jurisdictions will provide growth forecasts based on expected housing starts and migration into the region. These growth rates can be leveraged for an additional multiplier for years that have a growth rate higher than the current growth rate that is factored into the Survival Cohort ratio.

Forecasting for Long Term Facilities Planning

A forecasting template that also incorporates school capacity and projected utilization, allows the school district to identify future capacity issues that need to be addressed with portable classrooms, expansion of existing facilities and new schools. Forecasting enrolments provides a school district with valuable data to support the business case when requesting capital funds from the state or province.

Implementing a Forecasting Template

To facilitate this process, employing a structured forecasting template is recommended. Such a template simplifies the input of historical data, calculation of progression ratios, and projection of future enrollments. It serves as a practical tool, guiding school business officials through the systematic analysis necessary for accurate forecasting. To implement a template:

1. Collect historical enrolment data by grade for each school
2. Create a template for each school and list the historical enrolments by grade by year
3. Calculate the Survival-Cohort ratio of each year by dividing the years enrolment in each grade by the feeder grade's enrolment in the prior year (ie the Grade 1 ratio would be Grade 1 / prior year's Kindergarten number at the school). For any grades that come from another school in the prior year (ie Grade 10 students come from Grade 9 at another school), divide by the prior year number at the other school.
4. Calculate the average Survival Cohort ratio by grade at each school by averaging out the ratios for a certain amount of years.
5. Add columns for forecasted years. Multiply each grade's average ratio by the prior year's feeder grade.
6. The forecast columns will forecast grades based on the natural progression of the grades and the historical ratios.

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Leveraging your School Leaders for your Budget Enrolment Projections

School leaders, who are close to their community and interact with families on a day-to-day basis, have valuable insights to project forward enrolments for the upcoming year. Many school jurisdictions will leverage their principals to project enrolments and then will adjust to the final enrolment numbers once they are known after the official count date. However, it is important to keep in mind that there can be biases in these projections, depending on the allocation model and timing of staffing decisions in a school jurisdiction.

If staffing is mostly set in the spring and is not adjusted based on enrolment changes in the fall, there could be incentives for enrolments to be projected liberally to maximize the resources available to the school.

If staffing is set in the spring, but is adjusted based on the final enrolments at the count date, school leaders may be overly conservative in order to prevent disruptions to staffing in the fall as it is always easier to add staffing than to remove it in the fall.

Having a projection model to compare to the school leaders' projections is a good practice in order to have further insights on the reasonableness of the schools' projections.

Conclusion

In conclusion, forecasting enrollments in K-12 education is a multifaceted process that demands a comprehensive, data-driven approach, augmented by an acute understanding of local community factors. This simple but effective methodology enables school business officials to project student enrollments accurately, ensuring effective planning and optimal resource allocation. Continual monitoring and updating of forecasts with new data and adjustments for changing community dynamics are essential for maintaining the relevance and accuracy of these projections. Through this approach, school districts can confidently prepare to meet both current and future educational challenges.

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About the Author

Ryan is a Director of Client Success with MyBudgetFile, a leader in K-12 budgeting across North America. With School Business experience spanning small to large school districts, he has served as President of the Alberta ASBO and led provincial initiatives on financial reporting, school fees and funding. Holding a Chartered Professional Accountant designation and an MBA in Public Policy and Administration from the University of Alberta, Ryan is passionate about the School Business Official’s role in making a difference for students and in their community as a whole.

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