NZ school absenteeism doubles in seven years, urgent change needed - Steven Joyce

THREE KEY FACTS

• The number of students absent from school more than 30% of the time has doubled in the last decade, with over 80,000 students missing three weeks or more of school each term.
• The significant increase in chronic absenteeism occurred during the Covid-19 pandemic, particularly affecting regions like Northland and parts of Auckland that experienced extended lockdowns.
• Students in low socio-economic areas are six times more likely to be chronically absent compared to those in high socio-economic areas.

Steven Joyce is a former National Party Minister of Finance and Minister of Transport. He is a director at Joyce Advisory and the author of the recently published book on his time in office, On the Record.

OPINION

The Education Review Office report this week on href="https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/school-non-attendance-chronic-truancy-at-crisis-point-as-education-review-office-calls-for-reform/T5ZMYTLHMJF5BOAL2NMAWJOO3E/" target="_blank">chronic absence at our schools makes for sobering reading. The number of students absent from school more than 30% of the time has doubled in the last decade. Every 10-week term, more than 80,000 schoolkids miss three weeks or more of school. That’s staggering.

When you look a little closer at the numbers, the deterioration has been more rapid than it first appears - in fact, the doubling has occurred since 2017, just seven years. Perhaps the authors were being politically diplomatic.

It won’t come as a surprise that the really big spike happened in the Covid years. As many of us warned at the time, it turns out that telling kids to stay home for long periods during the pandemic did indeed send the message that school wasn’t important. It seems no coincidence that chronic truancy is worst in Northland and parts of Auckland, which bore the brunt of Covid lockdowns.

Even once you take out the huge Covid spike, school attendance has been getting steadily worse. Numbers rose every year from 2018 through to 2020. This year is an improvement on the Covid hangover, but still 20,000 worse than in 2020. There is something bigger going on.

It has been well documented that our academic performance is declining, too. This week’s Education Review Office (ERO) report was really just more evidence that our old education model is not working for increasing numbers of our kids.

It’s not just a problem in schools. Tertiary institutions report first-year students turning up unprepared for tertiary study, and chronically lower numbers attending actual lectures. In most second- and third-year university courses no more than 30% of students physically attend class. Many young people are just not buying what our education sector is offering.

Wider social dislocation is undoubtedly part of the problem at school level. ERO notes students in low socio-economic areas are six times more likely to be chronically absent than in high socio-economic areas. Living in social housing is another predictor of chronic absenteeism. But it is also clear that not every school in every low socio-economic area is struggling with chronic absenteeism. Just 22 schools nationwide account for fully 10% of all chronic absentees.

There are some social problems that are very hard for individual schools to deal with on their own. When I was working on the South Auckland Initiative during the latter years of our Government, one of the problems I heard from school principals was how some of their students would have periodic bouts at school, and then disappear “up north” for a while or down to Gisborne. Family problems meant they would be sent to stay with aunties or grandparents, only to return maybe six months later when their circumstances changed again. In the meantime they would have lost the thread of their schooling.

However, it is also clear that contracting out truancy to “attendance services” is also not working. While some schools are clearly trying to solve their truancy problem, others are abdicating it to the attendance services, and kids are falling through the cracks.

Technological change is also testing the relevance of school for many students. I continue to worry that the traditional education model of teachers or lecturers imparting knowledge to the students at the front of a classroom has lost its lustre for modern kids. When YouTube, Snapchat and TikTok are available 24/7, is it any wonder that school looks staid and boring to many. It was a great move to ban cellphones during school hours, but it may just be a Band-Aid for what is a much bigger problem of capturing and keeping students’ attention.

And that’s before we even get to AI. While current AI models are somehow both mind-blowing and underwhelming in equal measure, we’ve seen enough to know they are going to dramatically change the way we work, live, and interact. What does that truly mean for children’s education for the rest of this century?

For me almost the worst thing about this week’s ERO report was the response to it by the secondary school teachers’ union. This you may recall is the same union that wanted even longer Covid school lockdowns.

Prime Minister Christopher Luxon and Associate Education Minister David Seymour announcing the Government’s crackdown on truancy during their visit to Cardinal McKeefry School in Wellington in April this year. Photo / Mark Mitchell

Rather than seriously address the issue, or accept any culpability for the problem in a school system that largely reflects their preferences, they lazily took another political swipe at charter schools, calling them a “vanity project”. They offered no answer to the truancy issue except to double down on what we are already doing while seeking to snuff out any change.

How wrong can they be? The idea that our current one-size-fits-all, state-run school system has all the answers is exactly the wrong lesson to take from the ERO report and every other indicator on poor and declining school performance. Our current system looks increasingly out of touch.

We desperately need innovation, and new ways of doing things. We need more schools that offer new and exciting learning models that students will race to attend despite their difficult family circumstances. We need schools with campuses in Northland, South Auckland and Tairāwhiti that students can continue to seamlessly attend even as their families shift them around. We need teachers who are rewarded for individual performance, for bucking the trend, and for making a difference. We need them to feel empowered to teach using TikTok or any other tool the kids show a willingness to learn with.

School diversity is scary for bureaucrats, unions and some politicians. With diversity we will need more accountability at school level, for attendance, for academic success, and for important extracurricular markers like participation in sport.

Right now schools are sort-of accountable. Public schools receive no financial penalty for failing to perform, and therefore some don’t. Private schools do, and it is no coincidence they are getting stronger and recruiting more students. They are very incentivised to find models that appeal to children and their families. Schools operating under the charter model will do the same.

I’ve watched on in government as successive Education Ministers try to work with the teacher unions, and each time they get worn down and frustrated. This week’s intellectually barren commentary from the Post Primary Teachers’ Association on the ERO report is a telling reminder that the teacher unions are part of the problem.

They are overly political and obsessed with the status quo despite all evidence it isn’t working. If we are to save our education system and with it our economic future, they need to change, or ministers are going to have to go past them and work with educators directly.