It appears Associate Minister of Education, David Seymour, is very keen on the idea of a traffic-light system to alert schools and parents to their ākonga’s (student’s) school attendance.
The green-yellow-red system will presumably be based on term-by-term attendance and will signal when students’ attendance rates fall below the desired level of 90%. In particular, it’s proposed that the names of the red-alert students will be forwarded to the Ministry of Education for follow-up action as yet to be determined.
This conversation is taking place alongside the suggestion of fines for parents of students whose attendance doesn’t match the standard, and proposed cuts to staffing levels in the public service.
One wonders what resources will be made available, if any, to the MoE to follow up on attendance concerns? We also have to wonder about fining parents who may already be struggling; will this not simply impoverish households that can least afford it? And will it create a benign view of the school concerned?
The issue of changed attendance rates in the post-Covid environment is not unique to New Zealand. On March 29, 2024, The New York Times published an article, “The Crisis of School Absences” which explored the rates of absenteeism in the US.
The article suggests what has happened, because of the lockdowns during the Covid period, is that students’ relationships with schools have been broken. Schools, or “school”, once seen as the answer to all our questions, has become an option. If students can be authorised to stay at home for extended periods as part of an official plan, like avoiding Covid, why not stay at home all the time?
So, if some students who have enjoyed their extended liberty are proving hard to lure back, how might we manage their return? What can schools offer that a stay-at-home education can’t?
Rebuilding quality relationships with students, gradually and over time, would be my suggestion. Schools, classes and playgrounds are about relationships; building strong connections with, and between, students has obvious benefits socially, but is also true of academic performance as well.
Schools have to be seen to be offering something five days a week that they can’t get at home. Teens might say their relationship needs are filled by social media, but just as emergency remote learning was a poor replacement for face-to-face learning in the view of many of my colleagues in schools, so social media platforms are a very poor facsimile of their face-to-face equivalent.
Deci and Ryan’s Self-Determination Theory of Motivation holds that people are better motivated when they experience three things: autonomy, relatedness and competence.
Schools can provide students with autonomy through choices of curriculum subjects and assessments within those subjects; they can experience competence when they are supported - scaffolded - for success in their studies and relatedness can happen at any and all times of the day.
Schools that provided extended administration or “form” times, or work with students in vertical (across ages) rather than horizontal (same age) groupings, are connecting them with one another in a very broad sense.
Form or tutor teachers who interact with their students at a personal level are creating connections that bind students to their schooling. Subject teachers who use group work in their classes and move students around to work with one another in different ways are building relationships, creating a sense of relatedness and thereby enhancing academic success for the students in their care.
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs suggests people can’t move to the creative and intellectually oriented needs at the top of the hierarchy without first meeting the survival needs at the bottom; a sense of belonging sits in this lower section.
Schools that avoid the trap of academic streaming or grouping students by ability and instead use a high-expectation approach are likely to enhance students’ feelings of competence in their different subjects.
In my private life, as a result of my particular interests, I sometimes end up in mechanics’ workshops. A sign I spotted in one such place offered the opportunity for the customer to select from a range of services which could be “good”, “cheap” or “fast”; the proprietor’s warning was that only two of these could occur at the same time.
In addressing the complex attendance issue, let’s make sure we go for something good, which may rule out cheap or fast – our ākonga deserve nothing less.
Dr Brian Marsh is a professional teaching fellow in the Faculty of Education and Social Work at Waipapa Taumata Rau, University of Auckland. He is in charge of initial teacher education placements (practicums) in schools as part of a graduate diploma in teaching qualification.
