The government has hammered the statistic that 46% of students aren’t regularly attending school. The truth is a little more complex.
Behind a dairy, two teens in school uniform pool their money for some vape juice before heading to a friend’s house nearby. The teens know their friend’s parents will be asleep and won’t care what they’re up to. Back in the classroom, a frustrated teacher takes the roll, scanning across a room full of empty desks to register the large number of students who haven’t bothered to show up that day.
It’s a scene that easily springs to mind when reading recent headlines about truancy, and the oft-quoted statistic that 46% of students aren’t regularly attending school. Playing political football with attendance, National has taken the worse sounding of two overall attendance figures and run with it to support their narrative of opposition failings in education.
So is truancy really the problem it’s been made out to be?
While absenteeism is an ongoing challenge here in Aotearoa, the figures can paint quite a different picture depending on how you look at them. “Without understanding the statistics, people think, ‘This is terrible!’” says Principal of Remuera Intermediate Kyle Breweton. “But is it really that terrible?” That depends on the circumstances, he adds. “If [absence] is through hardship and [students] just can’t get to school, that’s quite different to a kid that’s swanning around Asia on a family holiday.”
According to Ministry of Education figures, in term three last year, less than half of children across the country (46%) were regularly attending school. This shocking figure is accurate, and yet on any given day during the same term 85% of students were present in class, which paints a far less worrisome picture. What do these two very different measures mean, and how can they both be true?
Firstly, the regular attendance stat (46%) requires some context to grasp fully, namely the definition of “regular attendance”. To the uninitiated, it may sound vague and easily achieved by any kid who shows up to school the majority of the time. But the parameters are much more stringent. In order for a child to be deemed as a regular attendee, they must be present 90% or more of the time. In this instance, “regular” is like scoring an A for attendance.
The stat for daily attendance (85%) shows that children are actually showing up to school in more palatable numbers, with an average of 26 students out of a class of 30 present on any given day. It is useful to note that the 15% of kids who are absent on any given day includes a full range of students, from those with almost perfect attendance to those with chronic truancy, which is why it is important that both metrics are captured.
But one statistic that took some digging to find is that 57% of total absence time is justified (for example, absence due to illness, being stood down, or for reasons deemed acceptable within a school’s attendance policy, like a family bereavement) and therefore outside the control of parents, schools and previous governments alike.
Vaughan Couillault, principal of Papatoetoe High School and president of the Secondary Principals’ Association of New Zealand, points out that the widely touted attendance figures don’t differentiate between justified and unjustified absences. “At the end of the day, absence is binary, a student is either here or isn’t,” he says. “So when you look at the regularly attending stats, it covers people in hospital, it covers funerals, it covers everything.”
In term three, 2023, short-term illness and medical reasons were the largest contributor to absence in every week, and the proportion of time lost to illness has almost doubled in the last 10 years. Couillault gives the example of a student at his school who had six days away this term with a chronic respiratory condition. “The term is 50 days long, once you’ve been away a week you’re not regularly attending. It doesn’t matter why.”
It’s a high bar in a post-pandemic world, where the messaging has changed from “it’s OK to send your little tykes to school with a runny nose,” to the now widely accepted attitude that people who are sick should stay home. In fact, those still following official guidelines around Covid infections will automatically fall into the irregular attendance category for the term if they happen to get sick on a Monday and isolate for the recommended five days.
The other influence of Covid has been lax parental attitudes toward school, which is reportedly the biggest influencer of attendance. After seeing their children missing so much school during lockdowns, many parents aren’t prioritising attendance as much as they did pre-pandemic, and there has been an increase in parent-sanctioned days off. A 2022 ERO report found that a third of parents would be happy to take their children out of school for a holiday for a week or more.
In term three last year, 21% of unjustified absence time was for this reason, with over 86,000 students taking a half day or more for a holiday. Brewerton says his school sees a definite dip in attendance in the weeks skirting the holidays, with parents using those extra days to extend the trip while taking advantage of lower air fares. Another piece of the puzzle is that many employees (especially shift workers) aren’t always able to take their leave during the peaks of school holidays, so if they want to travel with their school-aged children, they must do so during term time.
While it used to be a middle-class problem for children to skip school for winter skiing trips and beach escapes to the islands, these absences are becoming more widespread across the socioeconomic spectrum, given we live in a more globalised world. Increasing school populations have whānau living outside the country, so many of the recent so-called holiday absences are actually due to family reunification, especially after the borders opened again. No matter the motivation, with the average length of holidays lasting for 10.6 half days (ie more than one week of school), travel is another reason students slip into that non-regular attendance category.
Another common reason for absence is time taken for family or cultural events, such as a funeral or the unveiling of a grandfather’s headstone at the one-year milestone, as is customary in Fiji. Due to cultural obligations, Māori and Pasifika parents are more likely to keep their children out of school for such an event.
Bereavement is deemed justified in attendance records, but most other cultural events are not, despite their significance to the people involved. Pat Newman, principal of Hora Hora Primary School in Whangarei, reports that his school intentionally doesn’t start until after February 6th because of the large number of absences they used to have from families attending Waitangi Day events.
Other examples of “parent-condoned truancy” relate to wider societal issues like mental health and the challenges that come with deprivation. Declining attendance has been steepest in low-decile schools. Ragne Maxwell, principal of Porirua College, says that absenteeism isn’t usually wilful, and often comes down to pressures on families from increasing poverty. “Most parents want their children going to school regularly,” she says, pointing out that she often has young people missing school to help care for sick siblings so their parents can keep working, and that students themselves often have jobs to help support the family.
In New Zealand, under the 2020 Education and Training Act, every child between the ages of six and 16 must attend school. Parents can legally be fined for each day their child is absent from school without a justifiable excuse, but this is rarely actioned. The new government has hinted at more disciplinary measures, which does not sit well with Maxwell. “A punitive approach to truancy is counterproductive,” she says. “We are here to work with families and support them in sending their children to school. If they are afraid of being fined, the relationship will be jeopardised.”
Couillault, the Papatoetoe High School principal, agrees, and is adamant he won’t be fining parents. “Fining them $50 a day or whatever just takes food out of the kids’ mouths,” he says.
Associate minister for education David Seymour says that fines won’t be imposed on families facing financial hardship, but he has not provided details about the circumstances in which more punitive measures will be taken. Nor has he acknowledged the ever-changing needs and circumstances of families that don’t always line up with attendance frameworks and expectations.
The government’s hard line on attendance may be in part driven by their desire for better academic results, as attendance has been proven to be correlated with achievement. “Face to face, every day matters,” Couillault says. “The more face-time you can get at school, the better the chance the learning outcomes will be what you want them to be.”
But Couillault points out that the 90% threshold for regular attendance is probably unrealistic. “If I can get a kid to school 80% of the time,” he says, “I can probably get them their qualification.”