The $74 million package to increase school attendance will fail. How can 82 attendance officers get the 100,000 pupils who are chronically absent back to school?
Ministry of Education research into attendance has been ignored.
Attendance has declined because many parents do not realise how important full attendance isfor educational achievement.
Researchers in West Australia took the data for school attendance and matched it to pupils’ achievement in their equivalent of NCEA. As they expected, they found that students who did not attend school failed.
What they did not expect was the close correlation between exam results and attendance. Ninety per cent attendance - what the ministry regards as full attendance - severely affects achievement. But what astonished researchers was that students with a 100 per cent attendance record had a 100 per cent pass rate.
These research findings are so important that our Ministry of Education matched New Zealand attendance to NCEA results. They had the same finding: every day at school makes a difference to achievement. The first and last day of term, sports days, school trips, the lot. Every day at school matters.
Many of the 100,000 pupils who are today missing school too often have been taken out by parents to attend family events, to avoid the traffic, or to get cheap airfares.
It’s a mystery why, in announcing the attendance policy, Prime Minister Chris Hipkins did not tell parents of this research. When he was Education Minister it was left to his deputy to announce. Hipkins could use his “bully pulpit” to make it socially unacceptable to take children out of school for a family holiday in Fiji.
Once, New Zealand educated its young people better than any other country. As attendance has fallen, so has our educational achievement. There are now about 49 countries that do a better job of educating their young.
Falling attendance also explains why Pasifika and Māori students are failing. Around half are not at school today. An attendance of 80 per cent or lower means failure is assured.
Educationalists like to say the reasons for truancy are complex. There are a small number of parents who are drug addicts, alcoholics, in prison or have serious mental health issues. These families are known to the social agencies. Another 82 social workers will make little difference to school attendance.
For her PhD thesis, Dr Delia Baskerville in 2019 located long-term truants and asked them why they were not at school. While most came from challenging homes, their parents wanted them to go to school.
In every case, their truancy was not caused by “complex social issues”, but by events at school. Often a single teacher so humiliated them that they could not face going to school. The truants all felt the school did not care about them.
The truants knew they should be at school. But when they returned, they were so far behind that they could not catch up. The truants then decided that going to school was futile and dropped out.
Once, New Zealand educated its young people better than any other country. Photo / 123RF
Results follow the incentives. Schools are paid for the number of pupils they enrol, not the number of pupils they teach. Schools spend their scarce resources on expensive enrolment campaigns, not on attendance. A teacher discouraging a pupil from coming to school results in no loss of income for the school. A smaller class is easier to teach.
The ministry has research showing that when schools are paid for bums on seats rather than names on rolls, attendance becomes the schools’ priority and improves dramatically.
The ministry made attendance a requirement for funding charter schools. These schools took pupils who were not only failing NCEA, but also had poor attendance. Attendance at charter schools was excellent. It is one of the reasons why charter school pupils exceeded the state school average at NCEA.
If schools were paid only for the students they actually teach, attendance would improve and truancy would fall. It is a policy that does not cost a cent. Money could even be reallocated to schools which are teaching, from those which are just collecting names.
The $74m could go to rehabilitating cyclone-hit schools, but a fraction of the money could be used for something that would make a difference. During Covid, when students could not make lectures, the universities installed digital cameras and posted the lectures online. The students have found it so helpful that the universities are continuing to post lectures online.
Cameras are so cheap, it would be possible to record every class and post it online. There will always be pupils who have a legitimate reason to be absent. Posting class lessons online would be a way of helping pupils catch up.
Research has shown that when we know we are on camera, our behaviour improves. Cameras will help prevent the behaviour that is causing truancy.
Of course. the teachers’ unions will go nuts.
- Richard Prebble is a former leader of the Act Party and a former member of the Labour Party.
