We’ve been hearing about the poor school attendance rates of young people in Aotearoa New Zealand for years. Attendance rates began a gradual decline in about 2015. Reports on declining attendance vary in perspective. Some refer to non-attendance as truancy, which directs responsibility at the school. Truancy is a wilful act of deliberately skipping class to have fun somewhere else, like the skate park, the river, the local shopping mall, or video parlour. The inference is that the schools of these kids are not engaging them. School is boring and so the finger very firmly points to principals and teachers to lift their game.
Other reports relate declining attendance to an increase in transiency and poverty. These reports often include Ka Ora, Ka Ako | Healthy School Lunches Programme. Relating attendance to transience, hunger and poverty shifts the emphasis away from the school to the social domain. It points to financial deprivation, social class, and cultural disadvantage, and that Aotearoa New Zealand holds the lowest position in the OECD for equity. Responsibility for these problems is firmly the domain of government and includes addressing issues of social housing, income, tax structures and poverty.
Ka Ora, Ka Ako sits comfortably alongside attendance and is also closely related to school learning outcomes. The logic is quite simple. If you have no food, you are hungry and can’t think about anything else. According to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, air, food, water, shelter, clothing, and sleep are the most basic physiological needs and must be satisfied before any higher needs, such as learning, can be satisfied.
The relationship between Ka Ora, Ka Ako and attendance is also simple. Hungry children want to go to schools that provide food. I once visited a school located in the middle of a social housing block. The principal was quite clear about attendance. Provided his children were still in the same motel the next day, they would be at school the next day. His school did not just serve packaged lunches and breakfast at school, but also accessed the services of KidsCan who provided shoes, clothing, and rain jackets for those children in need of such basics. That is why the government’s proposal to cut funding to the Ka Ora, Ka Ako programme is so immoral. So many more children will not have their basic physiological need for food satisfied and therefore will not be able to learn.
A group of primary-aged children were so concerned about their peers missing out on basic food, they took their argument to keep the school lunches programme to parliament recently. These youngsters know that if you don’t eat, you don’t learn. Kia kaha to those brave young New Zealanders and congratulations to them for acting on their social conscience. Actions make a difference.
So, just how bad are the attendance figures for our schools? Data sourced from the Ministry of Education’s ‘Education Counts’ website shows 53.6 per cent of all children attended school regularly in term four last year. That is an increase of 3.5 per cent compared with term four in 2022. Regular attendance is defined as attending school nine out of ten half days or 90 per cent of the time. The 90 per cent attendance rate for term four 2019, (pre-Covid), is 66.1 per cent.
There are both unjustified and justified half-day absences and both measures have improved since last year. Unjustified absences for 2022 were 7.3 per cent and fell to 6.6 per cent in 2023. Justified absences fell from 7.5 per cent in 2022 to 6.8 per cent in 2023.
Unjustified absences include taking holidays during term time, truancy, offering trivial explanations for the absence, or unknown reasons. In 2022 truancy accounted for 3.4 per cent of unjustified absences but 2023 figures show truancy numbers have halved to 1.7 per cent.
Justified absences are those that fall within school policy and include short-term illness or medical reasons.
Adding together the percentages of justified and unjustified absences leaves 86.6 per cent total present half-days in term four of 2023, which represents a 3.3 per cent drop since 2019 (pre-Covid).
Attendance is worse for secondary than primary schools. Whilst primary schools average 57.2 per cent, for secondary the attendance rate is 44.3 per cent.
Looking at attendance overall, the figures are clear. Attendance is improving. Justified absences out-number unjustified absences. If we accept the justified absences, we are left with an unjustified attendance rate of 6.6 per cent of which 1.7 per cent can be attributed to truancy.
This hardly justifies the Associate Minister’s punitive threat to fine families of the 1.7 per cent of truant kids.
School principals and teachers want all students at school every day because they know that high attendance is strongly correlated with higher achievement. They can’t teach children who are not at school. But let’s get this issue into perspective and get real. The group representing the 6.6 per cent of unjustified absence, which includes the truants, is the group the government needs to target – not with fines but with support. This is the group with the most serious social issues including housing, low income, and poverty. Not such an easy fix, but a necessary one.