Region’s Let’s Get to School campaign gets 2000 kids back in class this year

Hora Hora School principal Pat Newman. Photo / John Stone

In just one term 2000 more students have begun regularly attending school in Tai Tokerau/Northland thanks to a concerted effort by the region’s schools to help families.

In August last year the region’s schools launched the Let’s Get to School - Tai Tokerau campaign and have been knocking on doors, putting on vans to get children to school, rewarding students for 100 per cent attendance and advertising since.

And their efforts are paying off.

Ministry of Education figures show that each week in term 1 an average of 84.5 per cent of students were present on a daily basis - up from 77.9 per cent in term 4 last year - and only a few per cent below the national average.

That equates to another 2000 students at school each week, on average.

This term’s figures were also more than double the 43 per cent of students present each week at the same time last year.

Tai Tokerau Principals Association president and Hora Hora Primary School principal Pat Newman described the figures as “phenomenal”.

Newman said the Let’s Get to School campaign was run under a regional umbrella which included a Facebook page, advertising at the movies and billboards but each school could apply for funding to run more localised initiatives.

Some employed a non-threatening person to knock on doors and ask families how they could help get kids to school while others had vans picking kids up.

Newman said the campaign was about neighbours and extended family getting involved and asking what they could do to help make sure the kids in their lives were making it to school each day.

It was not an issue of kids not wanting to be at school but about the “village” pitching in with practical solutions, he said.

“The kids always want to be at school Why wouldn’t you? You’re in a safe environment, you’re with mates, you’re doing fun and interesting things.”

He believed the same strategy would work for other regions and would be far more effective than the extra attendance officers being funded by the Ministry of Education.

Newman said a “bit more stability” this year was also helping drive numbers up because the fear of Covid had died down, people in the region had more housing stability and most were in work.

But he was not happy to settle for the current figures and was hopeful they would soon see 95 per cent of students present each day.

Newman said the weekly attendance data showed the huge improvements being made in the region despite the Ministry of Education attendance figures which were released this week showing Tai Tokerau had the lowest attendance in the country in term 4 at 38.9 per cent.

Those figures compare the attendance of each individual student and measure regular attendance as a student attending greater than 90 per cent of class time or missing no more than one day each fortnight. The weekly data looks at how many students were present each day with no regard for which particular students were present.

All the same, Newman was frustrated at the lag in releasing the data when the region’s attendance was improving each term.

Term four′s figure was a 5 per cent improvement on the previous term.