Education Minister David Seymour and Prime Minister Christopher Luxon announce the Government’s plan to tackle truancy. Video / Mark Mitchell
Associate Education Minister David Seymour has floated the idea of fines for parents who take their kids out of school because “they want get a cheaper airfare to Fiji in the last week of term”.
But Seymour wants to go further, and intends to bring Act Party policy to Cabinet for approval “at a later date” including:
Daily attendance reporting from the start of next year.
A “Traffic Light System” setting out the punishments for parents and schools for when a student is not attending - including fines for parents and police referrals.
Making attendance a priority for school boards, which would focus expectations on minimising disruption to students.
Using improved data and analysis to pinpoint the drivers of non-attendance, and to target interventions particularly for chronic non-attenders or students who are not enrolled.
Seymour, during a press conference with Luxon as they announced the plan at Cardinal McKeefry School in Wellington this morning, said some parents were sending their kids to work instead of school because they have no money.
”Others are not sending their kids to school because they do have enough money but they want to get a cheaper airfare to Fiji in the last week of term.“
”In those two cases, there’s going to be a different approach from the Government,” Seymour said.
”Fining somebody with no money is not going to make the boat go faster but if it’s more of a case of ‘won’t’ than ‘can’t’ ... that’s when a fine is potentially the right thing to do.”
By 2030, the Government wants 80 per cent of students to be attending school regularly - defined as attending school more than 90 per cent of the time.
Prime Minister Christopher Luxon and Associate Education Minister David Seymour announced their truancy plan today. Photo / Mark Mitchell
The latest attendance figure was only 46 per cent - one of the worst on record, and which Luxon said was “shameful”.
“It may not seem like it’s not a biggie, but it is a biggie,” Luxon said.
Seymour said attendance was worse in New Zealand than in many comparable countries including England (75.1 per cent), the USA (70.3 per cent), and Australia (49.9 per cent).
“If the truancy crisis isn’t addressed, there will be an 80-year long shadow of people who missed out on education when they were young, are less able to work, less able to participate in society, more likely to be on benefits,” Seymour said.
Labour leader Chris Hipkins said it was hard to know what to make of the fines for parents because there was no detail about it.
“That’s David Seymour’s policy, which he announced as part of the government announcement, but then indicated that the Cabinet had not agreed on that policy.
“So who’s running the show? Is Christopher Luxon, the Prime Minister, making the announcement? Or is it David Seymour, who’s making up policy on the hoof and then admitting that Cabinet hasn’t approved it yet?”
Hipkins said the target of 80 per cent of students attending school regularly could be reached while still neglecting those who were chronically absent.
“There’s a lot of kids who are sitting in that 80 to 90 per cent [attendance] category, and that means that they’ve missed, say, five days because they might have had Covid, and then they’ve missed one other day and fall into the next band,” he said.
“So getting those kids who are currently attending school 89 per cent of the time to attend 90 per cent of the time isn’t much of an achievement.
“The real crisis is actually of quite a small band of kids - and it’s still in the thousands - who are missing a lot of school. But the reality is the government will be able to hit their target without getting a single one of those kids to attend school more regularly.”
He added that getting schools to report attendance every day would be a huge administrative burden, as many would have to do it manually.
Labour’s education spokeswoman Jan Tinetti said she was concerned about kids with health issues feeling pressured to go to school. She pointed to her son, who she said was “a really bad asthmatic”.
“Going to school when you’re not feeling so well or when others are not feeling so well, actually could have been life-threatening for him,” she said.
“I’ve also had emails just in the last half hour from parents whose young people had been bullied at school, and they’ve said, ‘Is that on us, that our young people couldn’t get to school?’”
Cabinet has already signed off weekly attendance data to be published from the start of the second week of Term 2 this year, and a communications campaign to be rolled out around the same time.
New public health guidance - though there is currently no detail on what that will be - alludes to Seymour’s comments last week that there were too many students staying home due to illness; the number had doubled since the Covid-19 pandemic began.
”What we are effectively going to achieve is to rebalance some of that information that has been one direction that actually both education and health matter,” Seymour said.
But he added that it was ultimately up to parents to decide whether to send their kids to school.
Illness was the leading cause of absence in the latest truancy figures, though between 1 and 2.5 per cent of all missed school time was an unjustified absence, logged as being because of holidays or time away in a school term.
For term three last year, only 46 per cent of school pupils attended classes regularly, one of the worst figures on record. Māori and Pacific students had the lowest regular attendance rates at 34 per cent. For Pākehā students, the rate was 48 per cent while for Asian students it was 58 per cent.
One in five Māori students were chronically absent - measured as attendance for 70 per cent or less of the time - while for Pacific students it was 21 per cent, more than double the rate for Pākehā (10 per cent) and Asian students (8 per cent).
And school attendance has been dropping since before the Covid-19 pandemic. For most of the 2010s, between 62 and 69 per cent of students were attending regularly.
A green light (up to 10 per cent absence) would require schools to attempt to contact the family on the day of an unjustified absence.
An orange light (10 to 30 per cent absence) would require the school to hold a meeting with the student and family and develop a plan for more regular attendance.
A red light (more than 30 per cent truant) would see students referred to the Ministry of Education to make a decision on possible actions - including police referral or a fine for the parent.
Under the Education and Training Act, parents can be convicted and fined if their children are not regularly attending school.
The maximum fine is $30 per day for every school day the student is truant. Parents can be fined up to $300 for a first offence and $3000 for a second or subsequent offence.
But parents cannot be fined for student non-attendance without a court conviction; Act wanted to change that by introducing an infringement notice regime for truancy.
Seymour has also made it clear that parents who cannot afford to pay fines are not the likely targets – but those parents who decide to let their children skip school to go on holidays or trips could face consequences.
He noted reviews of the school lunch programme that showed it had a positive impact on attendance, but the difference was “absolutely marginal”.
Seymour has signalled changes to the programme, and he said that all the students who currently get a free school lunch would “probably” continue to do so after the Government made changes to the programme.
“We can do more for kids in greater need.”
Derek Cheng is a senior journalist who started at the Herald in 2004. He has worked several stints in the press gallery team and is a former deputy political editor.
