Budget 2023: School attendance focus of $74m education package with 82 truancy officers

The Government is looking to tackle record-low school attendance rates with a $74 million education package, including bringing back centrally-funded attendance officers to work with the most-affected schools.

The latest school attendance data for term 2 last year showed just 39 per cent of students attended school regularly - defined as greater than 90 per cent of class time.

That term was heavily impacted by a major outbreak of Covid-19 when people were told to stay home if they were ill and/or close contacts.

However, attendance rates have been heavily falling since 2015 and only intensified throughout the course of the pandemic amid lockdowns and regular learning disruptions.

Experts warn that students who miss even a few days of school a term can see lower achievement levels and are more likely to slip into truancy.

Last year the Ministry of Education launched an attendance and engagement strategy with 13 priorities to increase attendance and engagement with targets.

By 2026, the Ministry wants to increase the number of children attending regularly (over 90 per cent of the term, or on average more than nine days a fortnight) to 75 per cent.

Education Minister Jan Tinetti said the new funding, which will be part of this year’s Budget, will go towards more attendance officers and supporting the Attendance Service in helping reach that target.

The Ministry of Education has admitted it doesn’t know how many attendance officers - or truancy officers - are in schools or how much money is being spent on them. Employing such officers is up to the discretion of individual schools and targets chronically-truant students.

Tinetti said the new funding would come from a national level and help schools and parents with students who are not regularly attending and at-risk of becoming chronically truant (defined as missing at least three days per fortnight).

About $28m would also go towards the Attendance Service, which already works with students who are chronically absent, or not enrolled at all, and this will help it to support 3000 more young people.

About $8m would also go towards improving attendance data.

“The decline in school attendance began in 2015, but the pandemic has exacerbated the issue,” Tinetti said.

“We need to be doing more to help schools and kura support students who are not attending or engaged in education.”

A positive campaign in Northland schools has seen some classrooms return to 100 per cent attendance. Photo / 123RF

Last year the Government set aside $88m for attendance issues, including the Regional Response Fund - $40m over four years - and direct investment into programmes that help young people engage in learning, as well as the ongoing work through the Attendance Strategy and attendance campaigns launched last year.

So far, at least $6.3m of the $10m Regional Response Fund (RRF) has been paid out, been approved, or is awaiting approval for the year to June this year. This covers at least 130 initiatives involving over 445 schools.

Tinetti said there are many reasons why a child might not show up to school, which is why the Government was continuing initiatives focused on removing barriers to education such as free period products, free healthy school lunches, school donations, preventing bullying and redesigning our curriculum.

“These measures will, over time, ensure that young people right across the country are attending, want to be at school and are on the right path to success in their education,” Tinetti said.

National and Act have strongly criticised the Government over declining attendance rates, both urging a harder line in holding schools and parents accountable. Act has also advocated for on-the-spot fines for parents of truant children.

Meanwhile, the Education Review Office has today released a new report that found four in 10 parents were comfortable with their child missing a week or more of school a term.

“This matters - parents who are comfortable with their child missing school are more than twice as likely to have a child who misses school regularly,” said Ruth Shinoda, head of the ERO’s education evaluation centre.

They also found that when parents let children miss school on a particular day, for example to avoid an activity, children were more likely to miss school regularly, shaping their attitudes.

“It is really important that children see going to school every day as important,” Shinoda said.

“A third of children do not. And the research shows this makes them more likely to miss school.”

An ERO report last year, Missing Out: Why Aren’t Our Children Going to School?, said even missing two days of class per term was linked to lower achievement.

It found families were keeping children home due to illness, but also because they were tired, in poor mental health, or being bullied.

It recommended schools stress the importance of regular attendance, alert parents when children were not attending, and make school more enjoyable.

The report said regular attendance, defined as attending more than 90 per cent of the time, fell from 70 per cent of students in 2015 to just 58 per cent in 2019 before reaching 64 per cent in 2020 and 60 per cent in 2021.

It said in Australia 73 per cent of students attended regularly in 2019 and regular attendance was above 80 per cent in the UK, Republic of Ireland, the US and Ontario in Canada where benchmarks for regular attendance ranged from 89-92 per cent and the figures dated from 2015/16 through to 2020/21.